John Leguizamo Quotes

I like drama. I love being in a drama where I get to be the funny guy. That's what I really love the most.

Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.

Independent film is for actors that love to act.

It takes time to understand yourself, to go inside yourself and to question yourself and really take yourself to task. That's self-expression.

You know, I am kind of a bi-polarish schitzerphrenic.

I run the gamut of being incredibly shy and withdrawn to being a crazy-eccentric exhibitionist. And I have always been like that.

I love life, and I embrace every minute of it.

I'm hoping my play opens up conversations, I hope it makes people question textbooks, I hope it makes #OscarsSoWhite and #HollywoodSoWhite question things. I hope my play sparks conversation between Latin kids and Latin parents and people start doing their own due diligence as well, I think it's everyone's responsibility.

I grew up with a lot of cats like that and they always were so surprising, magnetic, and electrifying. You can't be with them too long because they burn you out but the energy, the impulsivity, and the freedom connecting them to their animal energy is just so powerful to watch. It's dangerous to live like that but it's riveting to watch.

I was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken when my math teacher said, "You're failing in school, you're messing up, why don't you just try this?" I said, "Alright, let me try it," and I started going to acting classes and I loved it. I thought, "I may not make it but I love doing it."

Marriage is wild. I thought it was this perfect land of happiness and joy. Wrong! After you say you do, you don't for a long time.

I'm not really against a lot of things unless they are just pure exploitation and then they create their own copycat culture that comes from someone acting irresponsibly. That's dangerous when that happens.

We are taking our culture and suturing it to America.

Like gum on the bottom of a shoe, we are not going to disappear. Unlike other peoples who totally assimilated, we are more interested in co-assimilation.

I see the new Latin artist as a pioneer, opening up doors for others to follow.

And when they don't open, we crowbar our way in.

Self-expression, to me, is something that you worked on, that you have mastered a skill to say something in the most artful way that you can. It's not just blurting stuff out and having verbal diarrhea.

Pablo Escobar is one of the great stories of all time. It's a bizarre, dark version of success.

It doesn't make sense. [Republicans are] not for us. You're not for my values. We're working class people mostly and blue collar. We're your cops, we're your firemen, we're your carpenters and the things we need - we need to protect our unions, we need to protect our Medicare, we need to protect the working class person.

People can be anonymous when they go on blogs and say crazy things that they would never have the courage to say to your face.

Self-expression is something that you've crafted, something that you've found.

You've practiced on that piano for hours, you didn't hang out with your buddies, you didn't go after the girls, you stayed in your own little geeky room or you wrote for hours.

Latins for Republicans - it's like roaches for Raid.

It was at a performance art space that's no longer around, Gusto House.

.. All of these great performers from all over the country lived on the Lower East Side, and they would take somebody's living room that opened right onto the street, open the door and charge tickets and put up chairs.

[Brad Furman] is incredibly collaborative, man. He's so respectful of talent, he has so much admiration for talent. He nurtures you, he lets you give input. Of course we'll debate if we disagree, that's just a healthy atmosphere to air your differences.

Yeah, that came out of a reading. It was great. It's such a fun crew to be with, and we all went out the night before and that really encouraged us to go out and get drunk.

Teachers are everything. I mean, you're a poor kid from the ghetto, your parents are busy working 24/7, working like a Mexican.

I walked around my apartment with food in my mouth asking myself: "How do I come up with this voice?" Then I found the voice. I called the director and said on the phone: "Guess who you're talking to Chris? Sid, that's right Sid!" And that's how I came up with the voice. That's a true story.

It's a product of being an actor, you know? A lot of your work doesn't end up on camera and some of the best things aren't always in the final product. But yeah, a lot of my stuff got cut and it was painful, but I know it was for the better of the movie.

After kids leave the house, they can decide to do whatever they want, but while they're under my roof, they're going to be lawyers or writers or something, something important, anything except actors.

I had a whole new respect for directors.

I like helping people achieve their dreams just like people helped me.

I had my neck hurt for like five years, I could barely move my neck from doing this stunt, I almost died twice doing stunts, it's really dangerous.

I did 40 voices for Chris Wedge, the director of the first film, before coming up with the version we used. He was hard to please, I don't know why. I gave him really slow talking voices. then I thought perhaps Sid could be an Indian sounding sloth. To find out more about my character, I watched footage of sloths. I discovered that the food they store in their pouches rots and ferments and half the time they're drunk.

I did an HBO movie called Undefeated that I directed. It was too hard.

We see them [animals] as the Ice Age is ending and we know that actually in the long run, they're not going to make it. And there's something beautiful about that, beautifully sad. The way the characters are woven together in the film adds to the emotion because they need each other. The message is that it doesn't matter what species you are, you can still love each other and that is a fantastic message.

The difficulty of being a Latin kid, a Latin man in this country [U.S].

Some kids are fine, but often I don't like what I see in child actors. My kids are young and they are already showing an interest, so I have to try to discourage them, squash that in them.

I keep my kids out of the whole business entirely. Allegra and Lucas are five and six and I'm not interested in them doing any acting at all. I don't want my kids in show business. I keep them as far away from my work as possible.

I don't think it's my responsibility, but I definitely try to create my own projects that are Latin-based with a Latin crew and Latin cast. I try to give all my characters Latin names whenever I can and make sure that they are of Latin heritage. But that does not work with every project.

Don't confuse the beginning of my world with the breakup of yours.

I wasn't even in a theater because I guess nobody believed in me, so I was in the hallway of a theater on a platform that they would move so the main stage show could go on at eight o'clock and I'd be gone.

I had a great movement teacher - he showed me how to walk so I wasn't becoming like a cartoon.

I wanted to enjoy the process. I wanted to enjoy just being on stage and giving back and the feedback.

You can't really walk anywhere. Where are you going to go? Everything closes at a certain hour and it's a highway with bars on it; that's what it is.

I gotta tell, that's one of the things in Hollywood that has not been a barrier. I've gotten lots of offers, and I did try my hand at it, I directed two commercials. I won best commercial of ad week [laughs] on my first try.

Sid [the character from 'Ice Age'] is a prehistoric sloth. Sloths move really slowly and they store food in the cheek pouches. That's where I got the voice that you hear. He had to sound as though he was storing food.

I'm just more comfortable with people who are like me than the people who are not.

I love cartoons. So when they came to me to make Ice Age and this sequel, I was so happy.

I really love it, I love working with directors that are very collaborative and allow me input. I've done over 75 films, it's just like you're an apprentice. You learn so much about camerawork, lenses, and I'm always talking about DPs and directors and they always give me lists. I think pretty soon, I'll be ready to move away from being in front of the camera.

The beautiful thing about acting is that you can go your whole life if you stay current and you stay fresh.

I think as you mature as an actor things open up to you in a lot of ways, especially if you do work on yourself.

I love his [Brad Furman] ferocious desire for perfection and his love of vitality, it feeds me, man. It feeds him and it feeds the whole crew. And he's got huge respect for talent. And that's why talent goes in and gives it 300% percent.