Richard Gere Quotes

1. Everyone responds to kindness.  

2. All of our energy should be in sacrifice and services. Suffering, at least.

3. I don't know any of us who are in relationships that are totally honest - it doesn't exist.

4. The secret of my success is my hairspray.

5. Billions of people don't practice a religion at all.

6. Certainly there have been better actors than me who have had no careers. Why? I don't know.



7. I cry every chance I get. 


8. I can't say I have control over my emotions; I don't know my mind. I'm lost like everyone else. I'm certainly not a leader.

9. Even in comedies, you've got to feel safe for things to just happen in a way that is natural and free, and recognizable as human.

10. I'm a 50 year-old guy and I'm not in shape like I was when I was 30.



11. I don't think that bravery is about skin. Bravery is about a willingness to show emotional need.


12. I do think that good actors can do any part. It doesn't mean that they are the best ones to do it.

13. I'm less needy about needing to express myself through acting. I have many different lives outside of this that are extremely fulfilling.

14. I'm voting for Gore because the other is unthinkable. Which most of us will probably do. I hope all of us. I've always liked Ralph Nader and would like to see a real third party, but the thought of George Bush as president is unthinkable.

15. I'm not that tough; I'm not that smart. I need life telling me who I am, showing me my mind constantly. I wouldn't see it in a cave.

16. In a way, one gets stability from being able to order the rational mind.

17. If the work is going well and it's something that has value with some meaning to it, it gives back a lot.


18. In saving Tibet, you save the possibility that we are all brothers, sisters.

19. Meditation is such a more substantial reality than what we normally take to be reality.

20. My first encounter with Buddhist dharma would be in my early 20s. Like most young men, I was not particularly happy.




21. Maybe the Dalai Lama is the only person who is totally honest, and even with him, he's skillful not to hurt anybody. He's skillful.

22. The Dalai Lama said that he thinks mother's love is the best symbol for love and compassion, because it is totally disinterested.

23. In film, we're playing with something that literally fragments reality, and being aware of the fragmentation of time and space I think lends itself to the practice, to loosening the mind.There is nothing real about film. Nothing. Even the light particles that project the film can't be proven to exist. Nothing is there. We know that when we're making it; we're the magicians doing the trick. But even we get caught up in thinking that it is all real-that these emotions are real, that this object really exists, that the camera is picking up some reality. On the other hand, there is some magical sense that the camera sees more than our eyes do. It sees into people in a way that we don't normally. So there's a vulnerability to being in front of the camera that one doesn't have to endure in normal life. There's a certain amount of pressure and stress in that. You are being seen, you are really being seen, and there is no place to hide.

24. There's really one character for every actor. The voyage is to find that one character.





25. Tibetan Buddhism had an enormous impact on me.

26. Western Buddhists in many ways are much serious Buddhists than Tibetans are.

27. What we all have in common is an appreciation of kindness and compassion; all the religions have this. We all lean towards love.





28. When His Holiness won the Nobel Peace Prize, there was a quantum leap. He is not seen as solely a Tibetan anymore; he belongs to the world.

29. When I started acting, it was really the way for me to be able to communicate.

30. When someone has a strong intuitive connection, Buddhism suggests that it's because of karma, some past connection.




31. When you work as an actor, you've got to feel safe even in what appears to be the simplest things.

32. Why is it when we have 10 million people in this country who say: "No", we still have a president who says: "Yes." In a democracy, something's wrong here.

33. We've had too many World AIDS Days.





34. It'd be different if he was staring somebody down with a loaded gun in his hand. But there doesn't seem to be any indications whatsoever that this man (Hussein) poses an immediate threat to anybody.

35. To read your own mind is to look at your self and read your soul. Hatred becomes love and that is the path I am working on.

36. (On winning best actor in musical or comedy at Golden Globe Awards, Jan 2003, for his role in "Chicago".) I'm totally shocked. I never win anything. And I didn't even want to do this movie!



37. If we do this work now, we may save 10, 15 million lives. It gives you a lot of focus. I mean, how many things in your life can you do that have that kind of impact?

38. This is an outrage. There are no freedoms in China. There are no freedoms in Tibet.

39. (On how to play Jewish character in 2005 movie "Bee Season" based on the novel by Myla Goldberg.) What I can do is find the keys that will plug into my own 30 years of training in Buddhism, and find things that are parallel or resonant in the work that I have done.

40. India is a country that I care about deeply. We're talking about a population in India that is close to a billion people. If this crisis hits them to the degree it's expected to, we've lost Asia.

41. The president of the United States coming there in a world where he's seemingly obsessed with terrorism, clearly obsessed with it, and talking about HIV/AIDS in the same breath, in the same paragraph, extremely important.



42. Maybe if we could find some genuine humor in this and then find a way to work together to change the situation as it is, then it would certainly make me happy.

43. Take part in the elections.

44. I honestly do not think about celebrity or image or sexual expectations on me. It only comes up when people have a list of questions. But what I am told is that there is a quality that I have onscreen, where it's a little bit of everything.

45. Bush's plans for war are a bizarre bad dream.

46. If the United States marches into Iraq without the backing of the United Nations, that will be done entirely without the backing of the American people.



47. America has never paid any attention to other people, so it's absurd for Bush to say that it's all in the best interests of the Iraqi people.

48. I'm 57 years old, how much longer can I be a sex symbol? Let's be realistic.

49. (On playing Clifford Irving, who falsely claimed to have written the official autobiography of Howard Hughes, in the 2007 movie "The Hoax".) I think Clifford had a great deal of self-loathing that he was dealing with. He's just like us; we all lie and we all cheat, and even if we don't do it, we think it and we could at any moment. There's nothing that he does in this movie that we haven't done to some degree, and some us do much worse than these sorts of lies. He even convinces himself of the stories he's telling. You can see that when he talking, he's like a bad actor. You don't quite believe him but you know that he believes what he's saying.

50. (Referring to his 1980 movie "American Gigolo" which catapulted him to stardom and made him an instant sex symbol.) I have always said that it's very flattering to be desired, just as it's flattering that people accept the reality of the character you play, but it was always ridiculous to assume that because I could play a gigolo on screen I would be anything like that off the screen.

51. (To British newspaper The Guardian, June 2002.) I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe.




52. (On Dalai Lama.) His Holiness is my root guru, and he's been quite tough with me at times.

53. (On Dalai Lama.) His Holiness said, if you can love and respect an insect, something we instinctively are repulsed by, then that's a huge step.

54. (On taking on the movie "Bee Season".) I thought it was an interesting ensemble of characters, all of them searching in their own bumbling way, like we all do, searching for God. I hadn't seen that movie before.

55. Tantra has become less romantic to me. It seems more familiar.

56. (On the Dalai Lama.) His Holiness doesn't see himself as Gandhi; he doesn't create dramatic, operatic situations.




57. As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love and compassion. That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond understanding. Please help to stop this madness.

58. I believe only God has the right to take life. We as people don't have that right.





59. I don't want to be a personality.

60. When I am there (Tibet), I am very happy. The Tibetans radiate. They literally send out light. His Holiness (the Dalai Lama) generates love and compassion to every human being. He has committed himself to that. I haven't made that leap yet. I haven't given up self-aspiration. I still love making movies.

61. (on George W. Bush) We have a President right now who lies constantly and gets away with it, apparently.






62. (on agent Ed Limato): He was the bridge between old-time Hollywood and Hollywood present. Ed was a master at orchestrating all of the feelings correctly. He had a rare ability to read a script and see what could be.

63. "Pretty Woman" (1990) is something I never would have done. Neither is "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982). I had no interest in these scripts whatsoever. It was the same person knocking my door down on both of them, Jeffrey Katzenberg, first at Paramount, then at Disney, who was one of my first friends out here and still is. At the point of "Pretty Woman" (1990), I had been kind of out of things for a while. I consciously (had) just said: "Going off to do other things" and I f... up my career to the point where (people weren't saying): "Well, let's get Gere to do that". I had to crawl a little bit to get scripts. Doing "Internal Affairs" (1990), for instance, was a very difficult decision for me to make because, potentially, that could have been such a piece of shit. It turns out to be one of my favorite movies and best experiences, too.

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