Quotes

[on his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (Sling Blade - Auf Messers Schneide (1996)] Getting the nomination is like gravy. Winning would be like whatever is better than gravy.

I was the fattest baby in Clark County, Arkansas. They put me in the newspaper. It was like a prize turnip.

Acting is playing--it's actually going out on a playground with the other kids and being in the game, and I need that. Writing satisfies that part of myself that longs to sit in my room and dream.

I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.

It's not that I don't understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.

I've been married five times, and people think that's some bizarre thing, yet I've got buddies who refuse to get married and have sex with 15 people a week. I'm like "Which is better?" At least I was trying.

People think the hard thing for an actor is crying and screaming, but that's easy. What's hard is a character who never tips his hand, who toes the line all the time. The hard stuff is never telling yourself, "Hey, I better do something here.".

[2007] I am fairly embraced by the Hollywood community, and I love making movies and I love acting, but I'm not real crazy about the Hollywood system. So the fact that they embrace me is a shock to me because I tell them to kiss my ass all the time. I don't understand why they haven't thrown me out on my ear. The other thing is I don't participate much. I have very few friends within the movie community. I hang out with some guys I've known forever. They're all broke and eat me out of house and home. But I stay home mostly and I don't go to the parties. Maybe that preserves me.

Most of the movies that are easy to get financed are movies about models in gladiator uniforms and wacky comedies with kids who get caught with sheep in hotel rooms.

[on as a director, if there's more interference on a film, the bigger the budget is] Yes, I experienced that one time, I've only done one big-budget movie as a director (All die schönen Pferde - All the Pretty Horses (2000)). And there is much more interference, to the point where it shows you that if there's something wrong in the film business - that's what it is. Not to say that there aren't good big-budget movies, and that it can't be done, and some people aren't interfered with.

[on Fargo (2014)] It was one of the best experiences I've had and the people that were involved were really terrific and It was well put together. I've been humbled by the whole thing. I don't think there is such a thing as movie actors and television actors anymore I just think there are just actors now. If I had a friend who asked about going into television I would say yes because you have so much freedom in television now that you don't necessarily get in film.

You know, what sets Armageddon apart from a lot of those big splashy movies is, it's actually pretty good. I mean, people love that movie; it's become kind of an American favorite. One of my lines is-I don't know if you'd call it iconic, but it's when I'm talking to the president and he says, How big are we talking here? And I say, It's the size of Texas, Mr. President.