Harrison Ford quotes:

I get mad when people call me an action movie star. Indiana Jones is an adventure film, a comic book, a fantasy.

We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.

Whoever had the bright idea of putting Indiana Jones in a leather jacket and a fedora in the jungle ought to be dragged into the street and shot.

I love the comic opportunities that come up in the context of a father-son relationship.

I'm like old shoes. I've never been hip. I think the reason I'm still here is that I was never enough in fashion that I had to be replaced by something new.

The kindest word to describe my performance in school was Sloth.

What's important is to be able to see yourself, I think, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

The focus and the concentration and the attention to detail that flying takes is a kind of meditation. I find it restful and engaging, and other things slip away.

You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.

I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences.

I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?'

Behind every great man is a woman. Telling him he's not so hot.

I was completely unprepared for the public spectacle my private life became, and didn't like it a bit.

I think retirement's for old people. I'm still in the business, thank you. I have a young child of nine years old, and I want to live as long as I can to see him grow up. I'm enjoying my life and I want to stick around for as long as I can.

You may get real tired watching me, but I'm not going to quit.

I have relationships with people I'm working with, based on our combined interest. It doesn't make the relationship any less sincere, but it does give it a focus that may not last beyond the experience.

I wanted to be a forest ranger or a coal man. At a very early age, I knew I didn't want to do what my dad did, which was work in an office.

What is news? It's hard to quantify. Certainly news has changed completely, and the morning shows are not really designed to bring you the news, except to tell you what happened overnight, and the rest of it is a kind of magazine mentality - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. It's harder to be an educated and informed citizen.

I was desperately unhappy with it [Blade Runner]. I was compelled by contract to record five or six different versions of the narration, each of which was found wanting on a storytelling basis. The final version was something that I was completely unhappy with. The movie obviously has a very strong following, but it could have been more than a cult picture.

I enjoyed carpentry, and it was very good to me for 12 years.

The trick of this thing and the beauty of this thing is that it's a cowboy movie first and then stuff happens. Even after stuff happens it doesn't change - it hasn't suddenly changed into another kind of movie. It's still a cowboy movie. And that's what's incredible about it because nobody has done that before, that's new territory.

My goal was just to work regularly. I didn't ever expect to be rich or famous. I wanted to be a working character actor.

There's a real simple analogy. You have to perceive it from the ground up. You have to lay a firm foundation, then every step becomes part of a logical process.

I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up. Most people in this business gave up and went on to other things. If you simply didn't give up, you would outlast the people who came in on the bus with you.

To me, success is choice and opportunity.

I've always been somewhere down from the top, so I've never had to suffer being knocked off the top.

I'm still interested in perfecting whatever talents I have and continuing to grow as an actor and continuing to be useful to the telling of the story.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

I'm like a fireman. When I go out on a call, I want to put out a big fire, I don't want to put out a fire in a dumpster.

Peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice.

Am I grumpy? I might be. But I think maybe sometimes it's misinterpreted.

There are a lot of different paths through the jungle, but...the simplest thing you can do is make yourself useful. Be easy to work with, be a hard worker and help people get the job done. And do it with as much passion and quality as you can.

I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.

I was always very grateful I was never hot. In the entire length of my career, I haven't been the most adored.

Really, what are the options? Levi's or Wranglers. And you just pick one. It's one of those life choices.

Some actors couldn't figure out how to withstand the constant rejection. They couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I played maybe one and a half games of Little League. The whole atmosphere of anxious parents and more anxious children was just too much for me.

[After playing Indiana Jones and Han Solo] hero image concerns me a little, though not for my sake. All it means to me is that I have a responsibility not to get caught doing anything terrible and thereby jeopardise my credentials. Not that I do terrible things, like running over dogs or anything like that. It just makes you think twice before you say or do things in public.

We have been led to believe that we have come a long way toward world nuclear disarmament. But that is not the case. Our government is not doing all that it could. We must urge our leaders to fulfill the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States must assume world leadership to end once and for all the threat of nuclear war. It is our moral responsibility.

I'm addicted to Altoids. I call them 'acting pills.'

With the CGI, suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

If I were a serious person, I'd probably have a real job.

The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that's maybe not a skill, it's a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It's my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world.

All my friends were going off to be professionals, and I said I wanted to be an actor.

The third time you say a thing it sounds like a lie.

You keep on going until you get it as close to being right as the time and patience of others will allow.

I don't do a huge amount of physical activity. I play tennis, I work out sporadically, and I eat well and take care of myself.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

'May the Force be with you' is charming but it's not important. What's important is that you become the Force - for yourself and perhaps for other people.

Wood burns faster when you have to cut and chop it yourself.

It's very little trouble for me to accommodate my fans, unless I'm actually taking a pee at the time.

The actor's popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.

Bikes and planes aren't about going fast or having fun; they're toys, but serious ones.

I rarely play a real person, because I don't think I'm a good imitator.

It doesn't interest me to be Harrison Ford. It interests me to be Mike Pomeroy and Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan. I don't want to be in the Harrison Ford business. I take what I do seriously, but I don't take myself seriously.

I could take Sean Connery in a fight... I could definitely take him.

My character is meant to know nothing about rap, and not to like it very much, but I know about it, because my kids make me listen to it. There's some rap I do like very much. I like Eminem, Blackalicious.

[ Chadwick Boseman] is a remarkable actor, and he's a remarkable person.

[ Chadwick Boseman] was not a baseball player. He spent, I don't know, countless hours, many months, working two sessions a day with professional pro coaches to develop the baseball skills that he needed.

[Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television.

[On being an actor] .nothing more than a worker in a service occupation . It's like being a waiter or a gas station attendant, but I'm waiting on 6 million people in a week if I'm lucky.

A bad guy in a movie has a lot of latitude for acting. He can walk up the wall, crawl across the ceiling, go piss in the corner and everybody will say, "Fantastic!" But somebody's going to have to catch that sucker. Somebody's going to have to play the guy who gets him in the end. And that's a better part.

Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team. I never feel competitive about acting.

Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do, a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie.

An actor only has his own understanding and experience to work with.

An icon means nothing to me. I don't understand what it means to anybody actually. It seems like a word of convenience. It seems to attend to the huge success of certain kinds of movies that I did, but there's no personal utility in being an icon. I don't know what an icon does, except stand in a corner quietly accepting everyone's attention. I like to work, so there's no utility in being an icon.

As a matter of fact, that was a bit of a problem for me at the beginning of my career - the problem of identification. In The Conversation I played a character who was gay, so nobody recognised me from American Graffiti. When I did Apocalypse Now, after Star Wars, I played an intelligence officer of the American army. George Lucas saw the footage I had done and didn't recognise me until halfway through the scene.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures].

Chadwick Boseman work as an actor, I think, is truly remarkable, and I had a great time working with him.

Directing is too hard, it takes too much time, and it doesn't pay very well.

Everything I do, I'm sort of half in, half out.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

For some directors, I'm the actor from hell.

Hard work and a proper frame of mind prepare you for the lucky breaks that come along -- or don't.

Harrison Ford may be getting old, but he can fight like a 28 year old man.

Hell of a thing when a man's got good health, plenty of money and absolutely nothing to do.

Henry: Well I'm sorry about your head though, but I thought you were one of them. Indiana: Dad, they come in through the doors.

Hollywood's got its own particular environment.

I am my age. I'm not making any effort to change it.

I am not the first man who wanted to make changes in his life at 60 and I won't be the last. It is just that others can do it with anonymity.

I believe that the racial injustice which existed such a short time ago probably would have persisted longer if the color barrier had not been broken in baseball.

I came across the script [42], and I read it, and I said, "I really want to do this." And when I had my agent call, they said, ah, you know, it's not what they're looking for. So, OK. And then I let it go for a while, and then it just kept gnawing at me, so I kept pushing.

I continue to develop some things for myself and also take advantage of good parts as they come along.

I didn't play much ball. I wasn't much of a ball fan.

I do not go to the gym. I do not train. I am not that careful about what I eat. I cannot give you any advice about keeping fit. The best advice I can give is choose your parents wisely.

I don't do stunts - I do running, jumping and falling down. After 25 years I know exactly what I'm doing.

I don't mind playing older characters. I find it interesting. There are parts I couldn't have got when I was 30 years old. So, it continues to interest me in the same way that it always did.

I don't think I have something that's pronounceable as a philosophy. ... When it was fashionable to say, May the Force be with you, I always said, Force yourself. ... I'll say again then, The Force is within you. Force yourself.

I don't think I've mastered anything. I'm still wrestling with the same frustrations, the same issues, the same problems as I always did. That's what life is like.

I don't think nostalgia is very useful to me. There is a story to be told, there's behaviour to create or to bring to the screen that will help tell that story, and nostalgia is just not really a big part of my emotional package.

I don't want to be a movie star. I want to be in movies that are stars.

I don't want to be a slave to electronic devices. I don't want to be connected to my friends. I don't want to send snapshots of my dog and cute pictures of my family life to my friends and family. I don't want to be liked, by pushing a button. I use all of this technology to basically replace devices that I had in the past which worked just fine.

I found out that drama was a fascinating exercise as a way to get out of my self and into somebody else's head.

I get an opportunity to communicate with the audience about the movie that I've made. I get the chance to bring attention to the film that I've made. I care a lot about the movies that I make. I want them to reach an audience, and I want them to be successful. I promote nearly everything that I do, unless I've got some bad taste in my mouth.

I had never even thought about doing something that I'd never done before or proving anything.

I had no expectation of the level of adulation that would come my way. I just wanted to make a living with a regular role in a television series.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so nothing of what I was studying seemed to fit. I know now that I should have taken advantage of that time and that I missed a great deal of the opportunity to educate myself.

I had the idea that the film would be much better served by a Branch Rickey look-a-like than a Harrison Ford look-a-like. I didn't want the audience to go into the film thinking that they knew me from some previous experience in the movies.

I have an attorney. I'm looking to be rich like Harrison [Ford]. I'm trying to have planes and do all that stuff.

I have children. I have other concerns. I have other focuses. I really feel very sympathetic and I would love to be able to help but I don't see this as the opportunity, having done 'Extraordinary measures', for me to suddenly leap on a soap box and begin to talk about the pharmaceutical industry or the desperate plight of sick children. I do what I can in my world but I don't have the bona fides to do that right now.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

I haven't purposefully set out to play heroes. I'm interested in playing the character who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. But he's really either just saving himself or acting in the service of something that's important to him.

I just don't think of age and time in respect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful and people who are thirty-five who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it.

I just like the process of taking something written on a sheet of paper and giving it life and shape. I like the collaborative process of filmmaking, which is all simply to say that I love my work and I would continue to look for things that have the potential to be engaging and successful.

I knew that there was an aspect to this story that was beyond the typical and that it was something very important about America, about our culture, and about bringing a story to a new generation that perhaps didn't know the details of it, (and) hadn't had the visceral experience that this film is [42].

I like working. It is where I feel useful. I have no plans to cut down. I am happy with what I do. There will be a lot more of me yet, that's for sure.

I never feel sexy. I have a distant relationship with the mirror.

I never followed baseball very much. As a kid, I never followed sports.

I prefer to be part of a positive statement. I'm not interested in the psyche of a serial killer. What I'm interested in is creating a situation in which people get some emotional exercise, which makes them feel like human beings and makes them understand that they are part of the human community with all its responsibilities.

I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up.

I saw what luck and success I had as an opportunity to twist it up and do something different, so I've always sought out different genres and different kinds of characters.

I shaved my hairline back and dyed my hair and wore a little powder, a little paint, a fat suit, and I changed my voice, but the emotions were consistent with what the point of the scene [with Branch Rickey] was.

I think American films right now are suffering from an excess of scale. Lots of movies we're seeing now are more akin to video games than stories about human life and relationships. Twelve- to 20-year-olds are maybe the largest economic force in the US movie business. I'm not a very nostalgic person - but I enjoy a good story.

I think I did have a reputation for being grumpy. I don't think I'm grumpy. I have opinions. I have an independent vision. I am a purposeful person. But on a daily basis, I think I'm other than grumpy. I think it is a case where I am coming to do business and not there just to be flattered and cajoled and used.

I think it turned out to be a pretty good movie [42]. I wouldn't lie to you.

I think parenting is a huge responsibility. It was in my time when I was growing up and there still continues to be that responsibility.