Ed Harris quotes: the actor slash director’s most shared quotes.
“You need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear and chaos and horror in order to keep life going.”
“The best advice I’ve ever received was from my father on his deathbed. He told me to gird my loins, which meant buck up and get things done.”
“The more you put in, the more it’s going to pay off. You’ve gotta commit yourself, or it’s going to be half-assed.”
“It has to do with you as a human being pursuing something that you f*cking care about. If you get good enough, all that other stuff will take care of itself.”
“Many of us entrepreneurs, business owners and team leaders are now throwing out our flight plans, and are faced with a new mission. I don’t care what anything was designed to do, I only care about what it can do. In normal times, for all of us, this is counterintuitive. We envision, plan, design and create products and processes to do a certain thing or produce a certain result. But when we’re faced with a seismic shift in outlook or an unexpected crisis, we need to decisively and creatively determine what our business, product or services can do to first survive and then thrive in a new way.”
“We’ll all be facing new constraints on our processes, where before we typically had all the resources we’d need. Sometimes, it is from within constraints that true creativity and innovation happen, and new solutions are invented that we may have never thought of before.”
“There’s always a reaction based on fear.”
“When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, you can’t go waving your arms around.”
“Each breath, you’re lucky to have it. So if I start getting nervous or excited, I just try to breathe and be aware of it. And feel my feet on the ground, actually feel I’m here.”
“I appreciate people who have passion about what they’re doing and have a vision.”
“You can’t betray yourself too often, or you become somebody else.”
“Seeing what happens when you rip yourself open is what your job is all about.”
“I think most people that are looked upon as doing something daring don’t necessarily think of it that way; they do what they have to do.”
“If I’m daring at all, I guess it would be emotionally. I try to keep things interesting for myself and to do things that challenge me.”
“To build confidence… I wasn’t afraid to learn more or explore myself. I fell in love with acting because it involved my mind, body, and emotions. You’re also part of a larger community as an actor.”
“The advice I would give to my younger self? ‘Relax, man. Back off a little bit.’ I can get intense.”
“Most of the best writing, the most creative writing, the most interesting, the most out-of-the-box kind of stuff, is being done on cable, you know, and on the computer. I mean, whatever it is, Amazon or Netflix or something. Because they’re just willing to take chances, you know, and there’s a market for it.”
“I feel pretty comfortable with who I am. After a while, if you’re not, it’s like, what are you hoping for?”
“Self-love isn’t such a bad thing.”
“I got in athletics, which gave me self-esteem and made me feel like I had a place in the world; that was the initial attraction with acting for me.”
“One of the first things I learned about acting was, the only person you compete against is yourself.”
“An artist is someone who has learned to trust in himself.”
“I made career decisions that came from the part of me who wanted to shun the limelight.”
“If I started worrying about how my constituents are going to react to every move I make, I wouldn’t be able to do my job here. I’ll do what I think is right and explain it later.”
“When I decided to direct, never having done that before, [that] is something I’m very proud of.”
“I was concerned about filling my life up with something important to me. To me, it was just necessary.”
“I am not one of these guys who works job after job after job. I chose films made by people I wanted to work with, about subject matter I thought was intriguing.”
“I feel like my place in this industry is still progressing.”
“I’m a very difficult person, but I take comfort in the fact that God made me that way.”
“Being a father does change you. You wake up in the morning and no longer think of yourself—you’re thinking about somebody else.”
“I have a tight family group that’s really important to me. I don’t want to work all the time.”
“The worst part of success is that you get used to a certain standard of living, and you end up doing sh*t that you otherwise wouldn’t do to support it. That can be dangerous.”
“Obviously I use a computer for various things and have my iPhone, but I think there’s something to be said for not doing anything, for just sitting, for just observing. There’s something to be said for stillness and quiet and not digitizing. Especially the younger generation. I don’t even know if they know how to sit still.”
“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”
“I don’t hobnob around with the A-team or whatever it’s f*cking called. I just live my life.”
“How should a person handle getting older? Keep breathing and accept it. The one thing I appreciate about getting older is that as long as I have my feet on the ground, I’m doing all right. Nobody’s meant to live forever.”
“I feel fine about getting older because I’m in good shape and I feel good.”
“I feel pretty comfortable with things. I love what I do, I’ve got good friends and I feel pretty good physically. So I’m content, at least in the sense that I don’t want to be anybody else. I’ll keep doing this until I drop!”
“I’m just going to keep doing what I believe in, fighting for the things I believe in, love my life, love my friends, and work with and for the people I care about.”
