- [on his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor (Sling Blade (1996)] Getting the nomination is like gravy. Winning would be like whatever is better than gravy.
- I was the fattest baby in Clark County, Arkansas. They put me in the newspaper. It was like a prize turnip.
- Acting is playing--it's actually going out on a playground with the other kids and being in the game, and I need that. Writing satisfies that part of myself that longs to sit in my room and dream.
- I can't sit through plays and musical theatre. I just want to run up onstage and mess up their hair and turn over the furniture.
- It's not that I don't understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.
- I've been married five times, and people think that's some bizarre thing, yet I've got buddies who refuse to get married and have sex with 15 people a week. I'm like "Which is better?" At least I was trying.
- People think the hard thing for an actor is crying and screaming, but that's easy. What's hard is a character who never tips his hand, who toes the line all the time. The hard stuff is never telling yourself, "Hey, I better do something here.".
- [2007] I am fairly embraced by the Hollywood community, and I love making movies and I love acting, but I'm not real crazy about the Hollywood system. So the fact that they embrace me is a shock to me because I tell them to kiss my ass all the time. I don't understand why they haven't thrown me out on my ear. The other thing is I don't participate much. I have very few friends within the movie community. I hang out with some guys I've known forever. They're all broke and eat me out of house and home. But I stay home mostly and I don't go to the parties. Maybe that preserves me.
- Most of the movies that are easy to get financed are movies about models in gladiator uniforms and wacky comedies with kids who get caught with sheep in hotel rooms.
- [on as a director, if there's more interference on a film, the bigger the budget is] Yes, I experienced that one time, I've only done one big-budget movie as a director (All the Pretty Horses (2000)). And there is much more interference, to the point where it shows you that if there's something wrong in the film business - that's what it is. Not to say that there aren't good big-budget movies, and that it can't be done, and some people aren't interfered with.
- [on Fargo (2014)] It was one of the best experiences I've had and the people that were involved were really terrific and It was well put together. I've been humbled by the whole thing. I don't think there is such a thing as movie actors and television actors anymore I just think there are just actors now. If I had a friend who asked about going into television I would say yes because you have so much freedom in television now that you don't necessarily get in film.
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