376 Quotes by viggo mortensen

It doesn't matter how bad things are, something good could happen always. And it doesn't matter how many excuses you have for behaving in an unkind manner towards others. There's never any excuse for not being kind and it's always better to be kind even if it seems pointless and that in fact is the highest wisdom - being kind. It sounds like a very noble, ethereal, simplistic idea but it's true.

I think you have to be flexible above all as an actor; different characters have different demands, actors that you work with are different in their approach, or how you get along or don't get along with them.

I was born in New York but as a baby moved to Venezuela and Argentina. I've also lived in Denmark, where my father's from. I've traveled a lot, and having that sort of background probably increased the chance that I was going to remain curious as an adult about people who are different.

As you get older, you get stuck in your ways; just as you become stiffer physically, you also become stiffer mentally and more narrow-minded unless you make a conscious effort to keep yourself flexible.

Having a mixed background and feeling a little bit like a fish out of water in most places can be a benefit.

I look at my job as looking at the world from points of view that are different from mine - sometimes radically different from mine.

People are becoming more intimately acquainted with people who are different than them - it's not so unusual anymore.

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely.

Every once in a while, someone would call me a foreigner or a Yankee, or whatever. In the United States, someone might say something, like how kids do, to point out that you're different. That would come as a surprise to me. As you get old, you either get defensive about it or you accept it and you reach out, because you realize the world's full of people like that.