Casey Affleck quotes:

My family would be supportive if I said I wanted to be a Martian, wear only banana skins, make love to ashtrays, and eat tree bark.

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were 'The Elephant Man,' 'The Magnificent Seven,' 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and 'Mad Max!' Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies.

I am in the process of starting a nonprofit organization that gives rescued animals a home in a simulated wild environment and, for those who have been tested on, who are disabled, aggressive, etc., their own space to live out their days.

I have friends who remember seeing fish hauled onto a boat's deck and beaten to death.

I have a very bad relationship with mice.

My mom has a good way of engaging me in a conversation about the choices I make, listening, being objective and open-minded, and respecting those choices so long as they don't put me in danger.

I think David Letterman is a genius. Night after night he is funny and smart. He seems to really enjoy his jokes. They seem connected to who he really is. I like watching him, and there is no one better at turning an awkward moment into something very funny.

I had a public school education - 3,000 kids when I was there. And there were a lot of teachers who would just sit there. You'd come in and sign your name and the teacher would just sit there at the head of the class and you would literally just have to stay in your seat for 40 minutes and that was the only thing you'd have to do in class.

For people who have... had curve balls thrown at them, it is easier to digest change and digest change in other people. Change only scares the small-minded. The small-minded and me.

They wanted me to do Scream 2, and I hate talking about movies I turned down, because it sounds judgmental. There's nothing wrong with horror movies. I enjoy watching them. The main reason I turn a part down is if I think I won't be good.

Celebrity never really served me that well; it serves other people well.

The first movie was mostly about George and Julia. This one is mostly about me and Catherine and our love story and our whole history. So it's a very different movie.

I like studio movies; I love big commercial movies.

I'm tired of playing the brat.

People should try eating no animal products for just ONE DAY a week.

In my movies, there has been little to do in the way of animal rights. I have never worked in a movie with animals. No horse-riding, no trained dogs, lions, bears. A few actors, but what could I do? We had to have them.

I believe veganism can be beneficial for the individual and the world, and of course the animal, but belief is like laying in the dark with someone and telling them you love them and hearing nothing back. So I've never had the confidence to get on a soapbox and tell someone else what to do.

For people who have... had curve balls thrown at them, it is easier to digest change and digest change in other people. Change only scares the small-minded. The small-minded and me

I tricked myself into doing this movie.

When I like someone a lot, I get scared that I'll let them down. My fear of sucking is worst when I feel like someone thinks I'm good.

When I was a freshman in high school, my drama teacher, an incredible, inspirational genius, the guy who got me into acting, he encouraged me to get the lead in a musical. They didn't have any guys.

Movies are collaborative, and that's part of what makes it a great experience. They're different from a lot of other art forms, but also it makes it seem like when you see the final product, you go, 'I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have done this.'

If I can't see the humor in it, how am I going to be funny?

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don't show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity.

The way people appear in the gossip papers, as they're depicted as celebrities, it's not often much like who they are. The more people I meet, the more that's true. Sometimes, they're worse.

The first dog I had was owned by an abusive couple. He was very skittish. He wouldn't let me hold him. It was explained to me that it was because of how he was treated.

What is acceptable in our culture, I think, is really detrimental. I think we ought to have a little more ownership over the kind of material and the content that we put in front of people, especially young people.

In a movie we try to deceive. In theaters, as they say, the deceived are the wisest.

I get offered a lot of the same type of thing... The teenage slasher movies.

After high school, I drove out to L.A. with a friend of mine who had just graduated also, and I started auditioning. I got an agent, but it was all 'Saved By the Bell' auditions.

Why can't people just say they were moved? Why do they have to say it's sappy?

I didn't have to audition. That's common, but it had never happened to me before. Normally, I hate auditioning. I need to stew and think... let the character develop and grow inside me.

When a performance isn't working, it's usually because the actor is trying to do something and they're not able to express their idea very well. It's a muddled expression.

I don't want to be known as someone who is deliberately trying to do things that are not commercial! That is not a good reputation to have when you're trying to be a working actor.

We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where it's taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.

I love getting ready to do a scene, and thinking about it, and talking about it. But the rest of the time, I'm so nervous and obsessed. I'm just tearing my hair out in the trailer. The whole time I'm really tense.

You sleep with people all the time that you hate.

It seems like they never say anything bad about actors, they just pump them up.

I was really short in high school. I was stuck on the bench in the baseball team, so I just thought I'd try out theater, and that was the last time I did sports.

Definitely, my approach is me-oriented. I feel like my job is to safeguard the believability of the emotions of the character.

I'm tired of answering questions about myself.

Great books don't make great movies. There's too much information in there.

Sometimes I feel like every movie I make could be the last. I know that's not really the case, but if I think about it that way and I'm very careful, then maybe I can build a career, movie by movie, that I'm happy with.

After I left LA... it was like waking up. And so I moved back east and stopped auditioning.

I read the book and I think, "Well, this is the movie we're going to make," and then someone else reads it, and they take a completely different movie from it. And both are valid.

I feel like my behavior goes over better on the streets of New York.

I like to just keep the land within sight. Nowadays they can tell you if there's a storm three days out. So it's not much of a concern. But I've never been a big boat person. I don't spend a lot of time at sea.

I'd like to never be able to get pigeonholed, which is difficult to do.

Most calves used by the dairy industry have their horns BURNED or GOUGED out of their heads.

I moved out to LA, got an agent, started auditioning. I didn't know anything about how it worked. And since I was really bad, luckily, I didn't get any of those parts.

You're encouraged to do the same kind of movies. But I would like to keep doing different things.

When people ask me why I don't eat meat or any other animal products, I say, 'Because they are unhealthy and they are the product of a violent and inhumane industry.'

Chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms spend their whole lives in filthy, cramped conditions, only to die a prolonged and painful death.

I live in New York full time. I can't live in L.A., because I fear people think I'm a vagrant there.

When you consider the many ways in which people have to make a living every day when they wake up, I figure that eating 20 eggs isn't that bad.

A movie's very different from the book, and it's different from the script, and it's usually one person's vision.

If you show up in L.A. with your shirt inside out or socks mismatched, people start putting change in your cup.

I think that the movies I do are the ones that I really like the least. I don't like watching them because of that problem.

In New York, as long as you're not peeing in someone's doorway, everyone thinks you're a gentleman.

A good leader needs to know how to follow.

My aim was not to fool. My aim was to provoke thought and stir emotion.

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity. In American culture, we obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where its taking us or what it means but I know we do it.

Sometimes in the middle of a presidential campaign, there's a political movie, and people are sick of hearing about politics, and they don't want to see that movie. They'd rather see "Godzilla."

But when I start to kiss someone - lust is the easiest emotion to generate.

When you're the guy behind the camera, you're aware of the reasons for the compromises or the changes that get made. As an actor, you go and do your thing, and someone else down the line then does all the math and goes, "We can't include that thing where he's pretending to be dumb and needling those people, because it takes a minute and a half, and it ruins the next scene. It doesn't make sense." If you're directing, you're the one doing that.