Keith Carradine quotes: wise words from the multitalented man.
“If you have something to offer, work on your craft. Get as good as you can get. There’s no such thing as luck. Luck is simply being prepared for opportunity when it comes your way. Be prepared.”
“These two words were given to me by a wise person, and I’ve hung onto them: accept and allow. It speaks to a notion of tolerance and the necessity to see one another. Take off the blinders, get out of the echo chamber, listen. You’re gonna learn a hell of a lot more listening than you will by talking.”
“You say you’ve been typecast, but it means you did something that worked.”
“You go into something for its own sake. If you take a job for results, you’ll be disappointed.”
“I changed my major to English literature, which was on the advice of my father. I finally said, ‘You know, dad, to heck with it: I’m just going to be an actor. But I’m going to go to school.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you’re going to go to school, then major in English literature. Those are the tools you are going to be working with as a man who’s going to be acting in English, one would assume.'”
“I was born and raised in California, the son of a Shakespearean actor raised in New York. But for some reason I grew up with this Western patina on me. I’ve always felt more comfortable in nature.”
“At Colorado State University, I majored in forestry, thinking I’d be a forest ranger. I thought I’d go out there with my guitar and write songs and watch for fires. I still feel most revitalized in that environment. Part of my nature still craves being in a place unchanged by human activity.”
“I learned early that there was no way I could compete with my father, a giant as a Shakespearean actor and character man in the movies. So I made my own way. Mostly what I learned from my dad was be prepared, and temperament is bad manners. So if you’re temperamental, it means you didn’t get brought up right.”
“My dad is very proud. Like many people, he judges a lot of his existence on the approval of his fellow human beings, and if his sons choose the same line of work that their father has done for 50 years, it’s a form of approval. It validates his life.”
“The family name opened doors but also put added pressure on me early in my career. There was a higher bar to get over to be accepted. They assume you’re only there because you’re riding on coattails. So you kind of have to have even more to offer.”
“I suppose it was kind of inevitable. I was artistically inclined, as the saying goes, and that was evident from the time I was quite small. I had a knack for drawing, I had an ear for music, and it was obvious that I had certain proclivities, certain tendencies. They were always a part of my life, all the way up through my adolescence.”
“Lee Marvin and Ernie Borgnine—these guys, you know, they were the real deal. And it was a great thing to do very early in my career, because I got a chance to spend eight weeks on a movie set up in Cottage Grove, Oregon with these two legendary actors. Talk about film school. Talk about acting class. But even more than that, it was a class in professionalism and just how you come to work every day and how you do your job. It was an extraordinary opportunity as a young actor, and as I say, I stayed friends with those guys all their lives.”
“One can’t help but bring one’s own personality into what one is doing, and it’s certainly true of us actors and it’s true of writers.”
“One of the wonderful things about the actor’s life is that’s what we have the opportunity to do; we bring all these aspects of ourselves and of our personal lives into the work that we do.”
“Pity the actor who’s never lucky enough to end up in the right role and have it work so well that people want him to play it all the time. It’s a kind of success, really. At the same time, you’re interested in your own craft and interested in the joy of exploring yourself through this crazy entertainment business of acting. Really, it’s a kind of therapy, isn’t it? When you get a chance to play all these different parts, you might discover a different aspect of your own nature.”
“Part of my claim to fame is that my first film was also Johnny Cash’s first film.”
“I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it’s a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.”
“Y’know, I had my youthful indiscretions. I achieved some success at a very young age, and that kind of circumstance is fraught with pitfalls for a young man. I fell in any number of them.”
“Life is messy. If one could chart a life as one does a heartbeat, how would that go? My emotional life is at an all-time high. It’s as good as it gets.”
“You have to have a serious streak in you, or you can’t see the funny side of the other fellow.”
“I can’t put bars on my insides; my love is something I can’t hide.”
“I’m greatly touched that, at this point in my life, I’m considered to have a body of work worthy of recognition. The bottom line is, I’m very flattered and honored.”
