Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“Making checklists of things you're looking for in a person is the numero uno thing you can do to guarantee you'll be alone forever.”

“While I'm not a celebrity, it's such a weird concept that society has cooked up for us. Astronauts and teachers are much more amazing than actors.”

“To be honest, I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form.”

“Celebrity doesn't have anything to do with art or craft. It's about being rich and thinking that you're better than everybody else.”

“The career stuff is for business people.”

“I would like to do a musical, if I could find a cool one. A song-and-dance role is closer to me personally than other characters I play.”

“My dad never blew anything up, but he probably had friends who did. He and my mom have always preached that the pen is mightier than a Molotov cocktail.”

“As soon as you are trying to be funny or dramatic, that's when things start feeling fake and boring.”

“Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history, people would gather around, whether by the fire or at a tavern, and tell stories. One person would chime in, then another, maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process.”

“When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.”

“When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'”

“I was studying for the SAT's and learning lines.”

“The movies I watch and the music I listen to and the books I read - those are important to me. It's very important to me, and I don't know what I would do without those things.”

“Hollywood has the idea that movies have to be dumb. But especially movies for or about teenagers have to be really dumb!”

“I don't blame folks for not wanting to put me in their movies or whatever. I understand if their audiences had an association with me.”

“If the goal is to get the best artists, actors, and filmmakers in the world to create the best movies, Hollywood does a decent job. And I think no one would disagree with me that it also makes a ton of bad movies and employs a bunch of hacks.”

“Movies are different from real life.”

“I mean, movies in general tend to sort of portray time, space and identity as these very solid things. Time moves forward. Space is what it is. You are you, and you're always you.”

“Even today, in our progressive times, in most movies that come out, the men have to have biceps and the women have to be thin or something.”

“There's an absolute prejudice that good movies are dramas and comedies are more dismissable. But I couldn't disagree more.”

“The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.”

“Every day I've got to be thankful that I am alive, and you never know - the cliche is, I guess, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so you'd better be at peace with whatever you got going at the moment.”