Richard Gere Quotes

A lot of times, I feel like people come up to me because they think I'm like my character in 'Easy A', or because they've seen me in interviews, but really what they're a fan of is a movie or a character.

It's very easy to confuse Sean Connery with James Bond. Sometimes in the entertainment industry, people believe the cake is more real than the baker.

There's a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There's quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.

The less people know about me in reality, the more they can accept of me as a character.

I think a lot of people have seen me on The Simple Life and think I'm a "spoilt airhead," but I was playing a character. The producers said they wanted Nicole and I just to be crazy and funny and say outlandish things.

The celebrity mill is so active these days that actors can make careers out of being themselves, and I don't know that I want to. I think I'm just figuring out how to make a career out of not being myself. It's hard.

In my work, I want to convince people that I'm that character. If they know everything about Lesley Manville - private life, all of that stuff - it doesn't help. So the kind of anonymity I enjoy is key.

I'm an actor and this is a role I'm playing. But people can get wacky.

I'm a normal guy at heart. But on stage, they don't pay me for normal.

When people come up to me and say, 'Oh my God - you're that character,' I feel like replying, 'No, I'm just like you; it's just a job.'

I play myself all the time, on camera and off. What else can I do?

It's a strange thing that we're actors, and we're always playing a character, and then suddenly we're at a place like Cannes, and we're getting photographed as ourselves, and you're like, 'What do you do?'

A lot of people may know my face and know that I'm a good player on the football field, but they probably don't really know me as a person.

People think I'm thick because of the characters I play. I think I'm brighter than the characters. Well, I hope I am.

Playing a character for four years, in people's minds, that's who you are.

For the two hours I climb on stage, I become the schoolboy. But as soon as it is over, I get off stage and go home and get told to wipe my feet before I come in.

I think a lot of times, when people who get a chance to meet me and be around me, they understand that I'm not the person that the media make me out to be.

It is a fine line to be this PG superstar and also a role model and a bad guy and playing off our personality.

I think there are two different types of people in television. There are people who can turn it on like a switch when the cameras go on, and then, when the cameras go off, they kind of lower it down a little bit. And then there are people who are on all the time, no matter if the cameras are there or not.

I have people tell me all the time, 'I was expecting you to be mean.' Why is that? Because you saw me in a movie? That's acting.

People tend to think that's your life when you're playing a role.

I find often in Hollywood there are many people who play themselves really beautifully. And certain parts are not that dissimilar from who you are as a person. And there are other parts where you would like to think that you have nothing in common with those characters, but you probably do have more than you think.

Men still assume I must be like the girl I played in 'Emmanuelle.' John Wayne was never accused of killing people during his free time, but I'm forever stuck with the image of 'Emmanuelle.' The truth is, I should have got an Oscar for that role because I'm nothing like that woman.

I'm a New York person. I've never gone out of the way to speak to the press to change my persona - I probably should have. It's too late now. But when I first started I was like, "I'm gonna stay this way. I'm gonna be this way," and I continued to. I probably should have sugarcoated it like, "This is not really the way I am - I'm an actor."

You'd think when you saw my old MTV stuff that I was always drunk and high and all that stuff. I wasn't.