Ron Perlman's Quotes

Almost all of your life is lived by the seat of your pants, one unexpected event crashing into another, with no pattern or reason, and then you finally reach a point, around my age, where you spend more time than ever looking back. Why did this happen? Look where that led? You see the shape of things.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

I actually think it's harder to play vulnerability, because you're having to delve deeper into portions of your own psyche, what it is that makes you human.

I couldn't make it on the swimming team in high school. In fact, I got thrown off the swimming team and was forced to audition for the school play because they had at the audition about 35 girls show up and no boys, so my swimming coach suggested that I might be able to do the drama department more good than I was doing the swimming team.

I don't have any preferences. I feel as though my criteria are based more on how challenging the role is, it doesn't have to fit into any particular profile, is it something that I've never done before, and is it something that I feel like I can really feel challenged and therefore fully engaged in, and that's when the work gets to be the most fun.

I feel as though my criteria are based more on how challenging the role is, it doesn't have to fit into any particular profile, is it something that I've never done before, and is it something that I feel like I can really feel challenged and therefore fully engaged in, and that's when the work gets to be the most fun.

I lost 90 pounds and my blood pressure went down to a normal level and the salt in my urine disappeared. And that was when I had to make the transition from fat character actor to thin character actor.

I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.

I think now that I'm in the autumn of my life, and I'm getting a chance of having an overview and looking at the shape of how things happen, when things happen, why things happen, I think it was fitting that I spent most of my early career doing mask work, because I just don't think I was that comfortable in my own skin.

I think there are a lot of technocrats in the business who would much rather work with just wheels and gears and machinery. Those things interest them more than humanity and I wish them the best of luck.

I'm just trying to make up for lost times, and I have total awareness that when the work is coming it doesn't mean it's going to continue to come, so I'm taking advantage of this phenomenal period that I'm in now, to its fullest.

I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.

In the early '90s, when those little art films started coming out, we were introduced to Quentin Tarantino and guys like that, and independent cinema was something that everyone wanted to be a part of.

Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie.

Really, I was such a late bloomer, I really didn't learn how to be me until I was in my late '40s, which is when I started playing roles that were closer to me.

I'm thankful to be breathing, on this side of the grass. Whatever comes, comes.

I just think that there are those people that their resolve is strengthened by what it is that's keeping them down, and there are some people that will buckle under it. You never know which one is which until you get into the eighth or ninth round of the fight.

I've never worked with a tail, that I can remember. But there's so much I can't remember.

I will not do a role that I don't think I can do, that I'm not interested in, where there's no humanity, that doesn't have any kind of handle for me at all because I know I'll just stink the joint up.

I never direct myself, because I don't like working with me. I would punch me in the mouth if I had to take my direction.

My self-confidence didn't come from my appearance, it came from other things that I did. But certainly not my appearance.

1% of the population has all the money and the other 99% have nothing.

Distortions control my self-image, like they do for a lot of us. It's irrational.

Every job has a unique situational circumstance.

Fearless people are interesting to watch.

I do voicework all the time.

I don't ever want to be comfortable with anything I'm doing.

I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon.

I live in a bubble.

I love great animation.

I say yes to almost anything that comes my way.

I'm a city boy.

I'm continuing to do research into biker culture.

I'm fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I've wired myself for failure.

I'm kind of one of these guys who wants to play everything once before it's all over.

I've been a professional actor for almost 40 years.

I've been busy and not busy, and busy is better. I've been busy, but I went through a lot of periods where it was lean for a lot of times.

I've certainly been very blessed with opportunity.

You want your mind to be boggled. That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it's more a pleasure if it's boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true.

It is a tough choice between ending up in the cold or ending up in a fiery blast.

We have a remarkably complete picture in many ways - and it could be that we're not accounting for something that's almost three-quarters of the entire universe.

As a scientist, you feel a sense of team spirit for your country but you also have a sense of team spirit for the international community.

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators.

I am delighted, excited, and deeply honored.

I tend not to dwell too much on ultimates.

I was one of those kids who always thought that we should know how the world works around us.

If you're puzzled by what dark energy is, you're in good company.

Nobody really expects a Nobel Prize call.

Probably the single most important thing about the Nobel Prize for most people is whether they get the coveted parking space on campus.

There are still so many questions to answer. When you look at any part of the universe, you have to feel humbled.

This is the kind of discovery that resonates.

What we were seeing was a little bit like throwing the apple up in the air and seeing it blast off into space.

You might expect gravity would slow it down, but it's just expanding faster and faster.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice.

From our point of view, the most exciting thing would be if we discovered something really fundamental in our understanding was just off a bit - and that now we have a chance to revisit it.

I will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot.

If you ask almost any of them, 'Do you stand behind your theory? Is this the answer?' I think almost everyone would say, 'No, no, no. I'm just trying to expand the range of possibilities.' We really don't know what's going on.

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.

It's an unusual opportunity, a chance for so many people to share in the excitement and the fun of the fact that we may be on to hints as to what the Universe is made out of. I guess the whole point of a prize like this is to be able to get that out into the community.

It's interesting to wake up at 3 in the morning by someone saying they're a reporter and they want to know how you feel. I felt fine, but I said, 'Well, why do you ask?'

So it's possible that someday, by understanding a little bit more about how the world works, it will come back to help us in some other way that will be surprising.

The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.

This new understanding of processes on Europa would not have been possible without the foundation of the last 20 years of observations over Earth's ice sheets and floating ice shelves.

You don't want to come out with anything that's wrong, of course, in a scientific, you know, a major scientific announcement, and so you're being so careful trying to check, well maybe it's this, maybe it's that, you're looking at every possible thing.