Barry Levinson Quotes

When I was starting out, doing guest spots on TV, and even commercials, I would go in with a whole crazy wardrobe and some terrible accent. Obviously, I was doing too much. If you bring too much flavor to it, it's absurd. There's something to just being spontaneous.

I still take it seriously, but once I go out there I think I've got more relaxed and I think it shows.

You can't put pressure on yourself. You've just got to go out and play.

That's what a lot of people say, especially in college, it looked like I'm lackadaisical out there, like I'm not really paying attention. If I'm always tense, I'm going to be overthinking the game. I try to just go with the flow.

I don't pay any attention to records. I don't want pressure. I just want to get to that line.

As always, with acting, you can't be too self-conscious. You shouldn't care about what people are thinking about you at the time because they're not caring about you, they're caring about the character.

I sort of set myself really high standards which is good and bad. If I know that I've done all I can to prepare, that's when I race the best and in '09 I was going through a lot of emotional ups and downs and I was never as fit as I would have liked to have been. So I never felt comfortable.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

As an actor, you try to put a little bit of yourself in everything you do.

I always want to give my best and do the best I can. I know when I have sung my best and when I haven't. There can be stresses and hassles with time travel and press attention. I just have to adapt and find a way of dealing with it.

I do know that the key to anything good is feeling relaxed and free. That's the main thing that you can offer yourself as an actor.

I don't find it hard to direct myself. I can easily think of me as a horrible performer or a good performer. I work with actors who cannot stand watching or looking at themselves, which is not my case. I can have an eye and perspective on whether I'm terrible or good enough for me.

I think the biggest thing was that I was putting pressure on myself leading up to Beijing. Now I am learning how to take that pressure off and seeing this as an incredible opportunity, but not like, 'I absolutely have to medal.'

The more I got into presenting things to the world, the further it was taking me away from what I was, which was someone who just used to sit quietly at a piano and sing and play. It became very important to me not to lose sight of that.

I am not an insecure person. For me, insecurity comes when something I do does not come across the way I thought it would. It would come if I had nothing more to say as an actor. I have a long way to go!

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I don't think I will be less good because there's less pressure on me.

It's important not to think too much about what you do.

What I'm doing is making sure that I have a balance, and that allows me, I think, to be a better actor and to more easily and quickly access all of the emotions on the scale. I make sure that I read a book on the weekend or read something or do my knitting or do the things that I need to do for myself, like 'Game of Thrones.' Get that balance.

As an actor, the only pressure I have is to just be truthful and to do my best work.

There are people who have really high expectations for what we're doing. I have to not think about that so that I can be free and play around every day and not feel like I have to get it right. You want to be loose.

I've got a lot of weaknesses. One of them is that I often get scared and tense when I'm working - and fear is one of the big threats to any good performance, because it closes you down and makes it harder for you to produce life in front of the camera.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, 'Don't try.' That fits the writing, too. I don't try; I just type.

I don't like to get too complacent. I like to give myself five panic attacks per project.