Joe Mantegna Quotations

Whenever you're going to play a real person, you run the risk of well, everybody in the world kind of has an image of what that person is and who he should be and so you really have to do your homework.

When they were small and my wife really had no other responsibilities, except taking care of the family and all of us, it wasn't that big a deal. It was fun. Hey, we're going to Moscow. We're going to Italy. We're going to Toronto. We're going to New York.

When I played Dean Martin, he was dead when we made the movie but there would have been nothing better than to spend a week with Dean Martin if I could have.

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

You know, you want to research it as close to the resource material as you can, you know, where you're going to be drawing it from.

I've loved it, but I have a wife and two children.

You talk to the real cops and they say ninety percent of it is paperwork.

I mean, I don't work with a system as an actor in the sense of method as much as it's a compilation of everything I've done and learned all my life.

For every Mother Teresa, there's a Jeffrey Dahmer.

There's now a Fat Tony doll, which cracks me up. But you feel honored that they asked you to do a voice.

There's good and evil going on. We have cops. We have robbers.

I mean, believe me, I'm not for censorship.

I've spent the better part of the last twenty-five years doing a lot of traveling.

They put me in the drama class, and that's the path I've taken.

Dean Martin is one of my heroes.

If at the end of the day, people look at it and say, oh, yeah, I liked his stuff, or for the most part I liked his stuff, or I've enjoyed watching some of the things he's done, that's all I can hope for.

For the last thirty years in my career I never know what I'm doing next.

I wouldn't be surprised if some day, they put the Simpsons in the Smithsonian. It's become part of our culture, those characters.

I reached that day that I always thought might happen, where I say to myself I don't want to do this anymore. I'm looking for some stability. I want to stay home.

I mean, it's the life lessons that I suppose you learn that nobody gets a free ride and that you do the best you can with the means that you can and try to open yourself to as much knowledge and all that that you can.

The actual time you're acting is miniscule compared to the time you're getting ready to do the work. The big difference on series television is, there's not a lot of hanging-out time. You're pumping those pages out, you're doing six, seven, eight pages a day. And I like that pace.

But we're still in somewhat a Puritanical society in a lot of ways.

I'm in the wrong racket if I didn't want a public life.

That's why I like the scenes where we're just in the kitchen having breakfast, because it's the interaction between people. The chaos.

I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.

That's why I really don't play cards or gamble. Because I'd crack.

But what I will do is I'll acknowledge it and if it can be of any help the fact that I do acknowledge it then maybe other people will benefit from it because I do have somewhat of a public forum being in the line of work I am.

If you're going to believe in a God, then you also have to equally believe that there's a flip side to this.

Actors are journeymen. We show up for work. We do the job and then we go. What goes on behind the scenes is what goes on behind the scenes.

There are a lot of people who will come to me for advice or whatever.

I did plays and movies and whatever all over the place.

You can't bluff someone that's not paying attention.

If humanity can exist for another million years, everybody's going to be a light shade of yellow-brown-red-tan.

I'm a character actor so I've jumped around to all kinds of things.

Scars remind us where we've been - they don't have to dictate where we are going.

You know the way I play golf, it's a good I do these things for charities.