Jim Parsons quotes: Sheldon sounds off.
“Well, I’m a big believer in ‘never say never.'”
“We’re all capable of so many things.”
“Someone else’s success is not your failure.”
“I don’t know a single job, whether it’s actor, writer, press, nobody… is here because they’re like, ‘Well, it made sense!’ It only makes sense to your heart. It’s a passion that you follow.”
“You just have to speak up. You just have to say, ‘I would like to do this,’ and it’s amazing what people who listen can do for you.”
“I think in many ways friendship is much more important. It’s hard to find true love unless you come from a place of loving yourself. Tied into that is confidence. Friendship and feeling you belong is the base from which loving yourself and feeling confident grows.”
“I think intelligence is usually sexy until it becomes irritating. After that, you’re stuck.”
“I’m not crazy; my mother had me tested.”
“I was very average in the social label scale going through school. I was neither the coolest person in school, nor did I suffer the slings and arrows of being made fun of to such a degree that I couldn’t get through the day.”
“I don’t feel very technologically savvy. I’m not a gamer or anything, and yet I have surrendered so many responsibilities of my life to technology, and it’s made a lot of things easier.”
“I’m somebody who takes technology for granted. You take advantage of it like you do electricity. It’s there—but hasn’t it always been?—even though I’m very aware that it hasn’t. I think that goes to good design, too, because the things that I use on a daily basis are so well-designed that you don’t have to think about it. It’s not a constant marvel. The marvel is that it’s not worth thinking about. It’s just pressing a button.”
“I would like to see computers help people live better lives. I would like to see it help people who are hindered in some way, whether it be physically or emotionally or mentally. I do get the sense that we’re headed there very quickly. I don’t understand exactly how, but to me at least you can sense that, and that’s a beautiful use of technology. That does something wonderful for humanity, more than just showing us where to buy things on Black Friday—not that there’s anything wrong with that… spend, spend, spend!”
“It’s better to surprise people with your warmth than have them running up and embracing you. I don’t wake up ready to embrace everybody every morning. It takes some coffee and it takes some thought.”
“Coffee is to wake up, coffee is to work with, coffee is to live with, coffee is life.”
“I consider myself so lucky to have grown up in Houston; it was so beneficial to me as a person in general, but very specifically as an actor. Almost everything about my career and my life is directly tied back to my time in Houston. Not only did I grow up there, but very specifically the career I’m participating in, acting, that’s where I got the majority of my education, and all of my early education in it.”
“Home is where you feel unjudged, and where what I do isn’t necessarily stupid or wrong.”
“The whole time I’ve been an actor, from early in Houston, my goal has been to work… to keep doing it. I feel at my most satisfied as a human being when I’m working on a role.”
“I try to master every facet of a character in order to build a safety net for myself, so I can go on to take more risks to create someone really distinct.”
“The Big Bang Theory has completely changed my life.”
“Playing Sheldon is just heaven for me. I realize how enormously lucky I am to play a role that makes me so incredibly happy. I’m living a version of the dream.”
“Realistically, there is a danger, of course, when you’re going into someone’s living room as the same guy every week. But I don’t fear it because, I mean, there’s really nothing I can do about it. I can try to combat it through the work, and maybe make sure I don’t do Sheldon 2.0 in any other projects. But it’s just really hard for me to find any negative side effects from this experience.”
“[On quitting The Big Bang Theory] I had this moment of clarity that I think you’re very fortunate to get in a lot of ways, of going, ‘Don’t keep speeding by.’ You know? ‘Use this time to take a look around.’ And I did. If you told me that, like my father who died at the age of 52, I had six years left to live, I think there’s other things I need to try and do. I don’t even know what they are, but I can tell that I need to try.”
“I just felt there are many, many ways of living this dream. I wanted to make my living as an actor and whatever medium that took I was very fine with. I’m quite pleased with how things worked out, obviously.”
“It is a major difference, for me at least. I feel a severe sense of gratitude toward the TV show. It doesn’t overly concern me either way because it’s led me to such a happy, happy place in my life. I’m pretty at peace with whatever happens. I get to do what I love and I have people around me who love me.”
“All I can do is keep working, keep auditioning, keep talking to people… and whatever it takes to show other colors.”
“It isn’t called TV money for nothing. There was a time where I paid my rent by doing theater for years, and I was able to buy groceries and pay my electric bill. I considered myself to be making a living as an actor. This kind of money that we make is a whole other level, of course. But it really is simply the cherry on top of a job and a role that I adore.”
“Not to make it all about money, you know. But money’s real. That sh*t’s hard for everybody. I’m at a level now where I have the ability to do what I want to. Which can be held against me if people go, ‘Why the hell did he do that?’ Well, you have every right to ask.”
“What this is about is hopefully an opportunity for me to help pave the way for my future in terms of getting financially choosier. You have to plan the windfall as if it’ll be your only one.”
“I came from a family in Texas who simply never spoke about money.”
“I’ve been a working actor for many years, but it’s not always been successful for me. I certainly struggled in the past.”
“No matter how successful you are, even if you’re a huge success in movies, you don’t get to check into the same parking space for 12 years. This is not how someone in a creative profession normally gets to behave. Most human beings crave that structure, so I can see how it causes some hurricanes in the heart.”
“I am hungry to get the chance to try new things, in a very general sense, and some of that is not even with acting. Some of that is taking an art class, or taking a creative writing class, and just trying to do all of these other things.”
“But more specifically to the Hollywood business of it all, this sounds so hippie, but I’m trying to learn how to listen to myself and really hear what it is that I want. It really is an unbelievably fortunate position that I’m in, and the hardest part is that it’s such a new position for me, that it’s hard for me. It’s nice to hear, ‘Now what do you really, really, really want to do?’ as opposed to saying, ‘Well, I need to do this now. It makes sense to do this now.’ Shedding some of that old way of thinking, I feel I’m still very early in the process of. I would say that time and experience is answering that for me. If everything could feel like this, I would just try to work back to back to back to back. But they’re not, and you just have to try to feel your way. I feel like an astrology-reading hippie, saying it like that, but it’s the truth.”
“I remember being very young and confused about religion and life in general. I thought you’d get older and get more answers and a teacher said, ‘Things only get more confusing the longer you live.’ She was right. Now it doesn’t bother me. There are just a lot of questions, more questions. I have no theory of everything and I kind of like it.”
“I love what I’m doing right now. Something else just as wonderful may happen, but it will never be the same.”
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