R. Peck Quotes

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

Jesus was lonely and sorrowful and scared-an unbelievably real person.

But for the first time, I had a religious identity. I had come home. And so I called myself a Zen Buddhist at the age of 18.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

The number one thing I've been doing is being daddy.

My sons have such a deep access to my heart.

Soap Actors are fun and interesting. They all have something special that you want to be around.

Ever since I got on Days I've been doing theater.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.

Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.

Losing my virginity was very boring.

Art is only great if it's uncodifiable. If art isn't scaring you, if it's not making you upset, then I don't think it's actually doing anything.

It doesn't matter what you look like really though, it is who you are that matters of course.

I mean, the great thing about being an actor is you can investigate parts of your brain that might have otherwise gone dormant.

Inherently, making a movie is tough because there's so much anticipation when it happens - even if everything goes well.

I think whether you're a movie critic and have seen a million movies, or you're just a normal popcorn movie watcher, you can tell the difference when someone is just laying it on too thick.

Anytime where you're challenged, physically or mentally, you rise to the occasion in different ways.

I may be Jewish, but my religion is hip-hop.

Some people won, some people lost [the Grammys] but Taylor Swift gets to wake up as Taylor Swift so she's winning.

The best notes are action-based and less, I don't know, heady, theoretical, because, as actors, we're too much in our heads anyway.

I love the phrase, 'Somebody's going to have a good day today, so it might as well be me.' I feel like you bring everything to the character, I hope.

Every time you sort of let go of the bar, you knew someone was there to catch you, and vice versa. And, I mean, come on. It's Method Man. It's been a dream to meet him forever.

You can bring truth to anything, whether it's a dance movie or an incredibly poignant indie drama or a really broad comedy. As long as you show up to play, I don't think you can go wrong.

Method Man, for him to offer me the spot as the first Jewish member of the Wu Tang Clan, you know, was an honor.

I don't really understand why I should be a role model but I know that children do look up to me, so it is my responsibility to motivate people and be inspiring. I hope that I can do that for kids.

There is a challenge of doing something new. Sometimes you have to suspend whether you believe in yourself doing it and just give yourself over to the idea that they believe in you.

I always had a weight issue since I was a young kid.

Gratuitous fat jokes always hurt, no matter what.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I have a respect for the 3-D computer-generated action movies, but my first love is stuff like 'Lethal Weapon.

I know about hip-hop culture, whether it's graffiti writing or DJ-ing or being an MC.

If you include quotes with your Instagram photos, you need to look at your life.

I'm forever in debt to Nickelodeon. It made me who I am today.

In life, I'd much rather have people laughing at me than booing me.

My favorite actor is Sir Ben Kingsley - nobody is as good as him, in my opinion. I think he's so good as an artist.

All the things you can do to prepare for a role that free you, in the moment, are great. You have this muscle memory for things. You don't have to act it as much, once you've done it enough.

I think as working actors, it's like sales. You're only as good as your last sale, so you put your all into something and you just hope that from that you can get your next job.

Acting's not therapy, but it can be therapeutic.

I have a very full and busy life and occasionally I am asked, Scotty, how can you do all that you do? The most telling reply I can give is: Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.

But I already saw no great difference between the psyche and spirituality. To amass knowledge without becoming wise is not my idea of progress in therapy.

If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.

If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.

Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.