Mark Ruffalo quotes:

People say funny things all the time during really serious moments in life.

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape. We were outdoors all the time and we played outside.

I love 'The Sportswriter' by Richard Ford. Ford really captures for me the bittersweetness of the quietly suffering American man. It's stoic, sad, and really beautiful.

After the brain tumor happened, I realized I love acting, I've always loved it, I may never get a chance to do it again.

I don't like this idea of Method. I come from that school, but what I was taught was that it's your imagination. You do your homework, and you use your imagination.

But, the relationships that I see work - As long as they're telling the truth, and saying the things that you don't ever want to have to say to another human being.

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

When you're a young actor, and you're really fighting to have your place in the world - for me, anyway - it took a mental focus and energy and striving. It took a long time. And it was my whole life.

I remember riding my bike down the boardwalk with nowhere to go and looking at the girls. It was really innocent.

I was bartending for a long time and going on auditions and was constantly being rebuffed.

The sculptor Frosty Myers and I met when we were bidding against each other at an auction. He's an eccentric, a liberal with a collection of rifles, and his stuff is big art. We share a love of tractors. I'm trading him one for a piece of art.

My personal belief is that you carry your own water in a relationship. If you see a girl and you think she's hot, that's a very human reaction, but you don't go and tell your spouse that, you know? So in one way it's how you behave.

Literally, I think I've quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

I woke up one morning with the knowledge that I had a brain tumor. It wasn't so much that I dreamt I had a brain tumor; it was like someone just poured the knowledge into my head. It wasn't like an image; it was just like knowing. It was so weird, which is why I paid attention.

When you get to be a 45-year-old man, you start to realize: 'I know who I am, and I know who I'm not. I know my shortcomings, I know my strengths; maybe some of my shortcomings are my strengths.' You start to face yourself as you truly are.

It's been up, down, and sideways for me, man. I could become a huge star, or I could get cancer tomorrow.

They would never let me be a crossing guard when I was a little kid. It would come up, I'd always raise my hand, I would never get picked . They thought I was too wild, but I knew I was responsible enough, if I was given that task.

You really can have your dreams and at the same time have a family. But it has to be a really deliberate practice.

I think of marriage as a garden. You have to tend to it. Respect it, take care of it, feed it. Make sure everyone is getting the right amount of, um, sunlight.

What Doesn't Kill You' is a really great movie that was little seen but, I think, is one of my personal favorites.

I have two hammocks, one Mayan and one Guatemalan, both family size because I like to lie in them perpendicular. When I'm working on a character, I lie in them and daydream. They're the best tools for working that I have.

The fracking chemicals sit in open pits, get trucked around, or sent through pipelines that can burst. What do you think happens when frack chemicals and floods and storm swollen rivers mix?

Whatever we want to think about American business - work hard, tell the truth, have morality - it's a myth. There's a lot of graft.

I ran to my marriage, I was happily ready to take on marriage.

And my mother caught wind of this. She never had really tried to guide my career or really had any say in my life as an adult, but this was the one time she said she would never speak to me again if I quit acting.

The laws of nature tell us there's a finite amount of any substance on the face of the earth, and at some point, that's going to run out. And if we're smart and we have some grace and we have some willingness about our destiny, then we will take ourselves into the renewable world.

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

But in my heart of hearts, this is the kind of thing... this is what everyone is struggling with in their lives - relationships and family. To me, it's always an interesting area to mine. I'm drawn to it.

I did grow up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, around a lot of my mom's family. I had a lot of cousins and aunts and uncles around me, and my sisters and my brother. Probably the most formative part of it was that we grew up on the edge of a forest. It wasn't a big forest, but it was enough. When you're a kid, it feels gigantic.

Sometimes, as an actor, you're so deeply immersed in a part that you lose control of it. If you're really lucky, a few times in your life it'll take you somewhere you never expected to go. It really blows the top off your understanding of your craft.

I have a very dear family and very dear friends. They're my rock. These are people who knew me from the beginning, you know, as a loser in a 1972 Dodge Dart with the bumper literally duct-taped to the body.

I had to work on a Marlin boat, like gutting fish, like as the bait boy.

Certainly, it's very easy to fall in love with cash. If you're going to make all your decisions based on cash, you're going to have a pretty naffy career.

I don't know, one out of every two marriages ends up in divorce so there's a lot of great people out there who people aren't happy with.

I didn't really have any interest in producing anything.

I think we've all been kind of... everyone's been hurt, everyone's felt loss, everyone has exultation, everyone has a need to be loved, or to have lost love, so when you play a character, you're pulling out those little threads and turning them up a bit.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.'

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

It is a fact that many of the wars and conflicts happening all over the world are aggravated or fought strictly for geopolitical fossil fuel energy interests, and many of the world's most dangerous regimes are funded by fossil fuel dollars.

Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.

My belief about acting in one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave.

I enjoyed growing up part of my life in Virginia Beach. We had the ocean and the beach and a beautiful landscape.

It is a fact that, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution. It is a fact that we are already dealing with the catastrophe of climate change in places like California, where people have been burnt out of their homes and where they are dealing with record droughts.

I guess the biggest lesson would be to have faith in that little part of yourself that knows what it's doing, knows what it wants, knows what you should be doing, even when all the clamour around you is telling you something else. That's the part that you want to keep alive and that's the part that people want to see when they see you on the screen.

Whoever controls your energy controls your destiny. 100 percent renewable energy is 100 percent American.

The abundance that is offered to us by leaving behind the fossil fuel paradigm is very promising for the world and the people of the world. We will have cleaner air, water, and food; we will have more resources to share with our people. There will be more economic freedom because people will be able to harvest their own energy.

Even if my movies weren't big blockbusters, directors generally liked me, so they would fight for me.

It's easy to do nothing, but your heart breaks a little more every time you do.

The biggest industry hoax is that the United States can't move to renewable energy now. It's a lie.

Love conquers all - love is the grace that transcends any kind of injustice in the end.

There's a misperception about actors that we actually choose the roles we end up doing - it's more that we're chosen for them.

I know what it's like to have these big multinational corporations invade your land and promise jobs and promise it's gonna be safe, and then you see the consequences.

Burning natural gas will not save us from climate change. It's the same as burning any other carbon-based fuel.

The one great thing about a continuing collaboration is that they know you. And if you're really lucky, they really believe in you and think that your talent has some unending bounds to it.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

When you're on the road, you sort of go crazy and being away from your family you get stir-crazy and lonely, so I try to keep myself involved as much as possible.

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

When you're trying to do character work that's different from what people expect from you, you're sort of in territory that is uncharted, and you don't know how it's playing all the time.

When you have to fight for the things you love, you have to measure the value of those things in ways you may not in any other way.

I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That's my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.

Commercials that are geared towards kids. I think they should just, like, wipe them out.

I live a bourgeois life.

With indies, all they have is their script and it's very important to them. The characters are better drawn, the stories more precise and the experience greater than with studio films where sometimes they fill in the script as they're shooting.

For the longest time, I was Scott Ruffalo's brother. I mean, he was the mayor of Beverly Hills. He was just so beloved there.

I was probably 8 years old; my mom let me stay up one night. She's like, 'You have to see this movie.' It was 'A Streetcar Named Desire,' and it was on TV, and it was a big deal. And I saw Marlon Brando, and I was like, 'Oh, my God.' That's where it started.

It's imperative that we opt out of the fossil fuel endgame.

I was an introverted kid; I liked my time alone. And the rest of my family is pretty extroverted, so I felt like a bit of an oddball. They're very gregarious and charming and charismatic people. I always felt like I was struggling as a young person. I think everyone was very surprised to hear that I wanted to be an actor.

My mom was a hairdresser. My aunt was a hairdresser. My brother was a hairdresser. My sisters are hairdressers.

As we're bombarded with the imagery that we are and now, post 9-11, it's hard not to get hardened by the world and the amount of violence that's allowed to be shown to kids these days.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

If I'm working in the city, then as soon as I'm home, I try to lock in on my son for a few hours. Every day. I see how important it is that he's starting to come into my world now. It's just an effort to give him that male mode of being.

If you're not yelling at your kids, then you're not spending enough time with them!

Also, stick around. Don't lose your heart, just keep going, keep at it.

I like to think the movies that I've picked have something worthwhile to say. Something relevant.

I still feel like I'm trying to make it. It's hard to shed the struggling actor thing.

"What is normal?" really becomes the question. What is normal, and how are we fooled into thinking it's something other than what we're doing at any given time. Every family has either a drug addict or an alcoholic or some sort of dysfunction that the family is dealing with. And I think the grace of this family is that they actually could be that far out there but also be forgiving, and be really human, and be human in front of each other without much shame.

A home life where it's so full of so many rigorous ideas about the way things should be, this word "should," I think is absolutely toxic to children. It hurts their personalities, it hurts their points of view in the world, it hurts their ability to be open and caring and curious. An element of allowance in a family, is, I think, really a positive thing.

A leader in America or anyone who says they truly care about this nation without taking some kind of action is either a liar or insane. In either case, they are unfit to lead.

Activists must be admired for the sacrifices they are willing to make for those things they hold dear. I would say those kinds of ways of looking at life enrich the value of life, and that is a good thing.

Actors, you kind of have these ebbs and flows. These moments where you're in your glory - where you're really cracking - and moments where you're not.

Artists have always been the front line; that's part of our responsibility. But a lot of the big actors come out, they get slammed, and then they retreat.

As an actor, I started using dreams more, which is not mystical or anything like that. I just found that I've been using that as a tool to give me another point of view towards the work. It's often surprising but really helpful.

As an actor, you want to remain vulnerable. You don't want to always have all the answers and you want to be fine doing things in the moment with your fellow actors.

Ask people who are close to the natural world: farmers, people who work the land or in some way use the land for their livelihoods. They will tell you what they are seeing isn't so good. They will tell you the changes they have seen in the past twenty years are remarkable in one way or another and unlike anything they had seen before that.

By electrifying our lives, we reduce our energy costs by 39 percent, which is a huge savings in itself.

Climate change is not going away. It will only get more extreme and more dangerous with time. There is no hiding from it. Yes, those living in poverty today will be hit first and the hardest, but we are all going to feel it and see it. We already are.

Climate change is the greatest threat to our existence in our short history on this planet. Nobody's going to buy their way out of its effects.

Do theater. Because you'll develop a craft that you'll always have. It'll give you a chance to really learn how to act and you won't go into the world with a few measly tricks that will only carry you so far.

Each role, I feel like takes you on a different journey based on who that character is.

Electrify your life! With heating and cooling, cooking and travel, and you will be doing a lot to help the future of this planet. There is no need to burn anything anymore.

Folks should be able to harvest, store, use, or sell their own energy as they see fit. This is not a Democratic nor Republican issue, and if anyone tries to convince you it is, they are being purposely misleading.

For some reason, my whole life has been, 'You can't do this, you can't do that.

Graduates, I'm asking each of you, at some point, to act up, be misbehaved. Buck the system. Fight for what you believe in. This is the time to do it. You're the ones to do it. Your world, is like no other generation, you actually get to create the world that you can imagine.

I always like having kid energy around. I think it's good for a movie, even when you're doing dramatic stuff.

I am grateful to the fossil fuel industry for bringing us the concentrated carbon that took us through the Industrial Revolution and through the technological revolution and brought us to the gateway of the renewable energy revolution, or what I call the sunlight revolution. But that is where we must part ways. It's the natural order.

I became an actor so I didn't have to be myself.

I became really aware that when you're making a movie, you're making it three times. You're making it when you're writing it. You're making it when you're shooting it. And then you're remaking it again when you're editing it.

I come from a traditional theater background.

I come from the theatre where there are no boundaries to the style you're doing; you're doing Molière, then you're doing Chekhov and then you're doing Arthur Miller in a season and no-one bats an eye.

I didn't like the distance between my family and myself that I was experiencing from having to work all the time.

I don't understand how people can take a gentle, loving life and treat it with such cruelty.

I don't want to feel like I'm stuck doing one-stock performances.

I grew up on Lake Michigan during the PCB explosion, and I remember seeing the sick, dead fish with tumors, the weird deformed seagulls, the scum and the filth floating. We couldn't go swimming.

I have a bag full of stuff that I give to people when they come to my house.

I have a carpool with a corrections officer and a construction worker. My kids get to see that we're not segregated based on wealth or standing. It's very cool.

I haven't had such an overwhelmingly positive response as I have from The Normal Heart directly to me. And it's a blessing. If this is it, if I have a piano dropped on me tomorrow, then I would go down thinking, You know what, I did okay as far as my career goes, because that's a gift. That's rare.

I like extremes. I like to change things up and keep from getting complacent or stale.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

I love acting and I love it in all its different manifestations.

I think people ought to realize that if you're doing investigative reporting, you're putting something on your newspaper or on your website that no one can get anywhere else, and theoretically at least, that should make people subscribe.

I try to do the things that speak to me in one way or another, and sometimes I'm even drastic.

I'd never seen anyone do a rebuttal review to some of the reviews.

I'm very nervous in the beginning and then I get in there and start doing my work and I feel more comfortable.

It is a fact that our fresh water is becoming more scarce and that the new ways we are getting energy in America - fracking, mountaintop removal, cyclic steam extraction, deep-sea drilling - all pollute water, pollute the air, and pollute our soil and food.

It is a fact that, today, up to seven million people a year are dying from fossil fuel pollution.

It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the "kingdom", so to speak... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole.

It's a point of pride that no one would treat me any differently because I'm an actor than if I was a gardener.

I've just been more interested in doing film right now and I don't want to go away from my family for six months, which was what I would have had to have done if I did the play on Broadway.

Most great parts for guys in wheelchairs tend to go to actors who walk.

My dad sent me a text saying, 'You know who you should play? Columbo. That's your Academy Award.'