Top 160 Christopher Walken Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have a friend of mine who does me on his answering machine, and when I call him, I answer. It’s pretty strange.”

— Christopher Walken

52. “I feel like you are this or that because other people say so. I wouldn’t know how to play a psychopath. I don’t think about it that way. You think about playing the scene but if the other people say that guy is crazy, then you are.”

— Christopher Walken

53. “I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy – or, I don’t tend to get those parts. I’ve tended to play eccentrics. I’ve played a lot of villains, of course.”

— Christopher Walken

54. “To me, there are things you’re good at and things you’re not so good at. For some reason, I’m good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.”

— Christopher Walken

55. “The thing about cooking is it’s so interesting to watch. I don’t know why, but if you go to somebody’s house and they’re making something, they usually say interesting things while they’re cooking.”

— Christopher Walken

56. “Guns make me very nervous. They’re dangerous. I’m more of a pacifist than anyone could imagine.”

— Christopher Walken

57. “In the theater you rehearse in order to do the performance. And in the movies the rehearsal and the performance are kind of the same thing. You’re figuring it out and hopefully the camera is pointed at you when you’re doing it.”

— Christopher Walken

58. “I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.”

— Christopher Walken

59. “I’m scared of everything. I think it’s only sensible to be that way.”

— Christopher Walken

60. “I don’t know why people eat so badly. I could eat pasta all the time, but it really is fattening. And I love ice cream, but I can’t do that. There was a time, until I was in my mid-forties, when I could eat a whole pizza – and really, no effect.”

— Christopher Walken

61. “Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it’s just that there’s more of us out there.”

— Christopher Walken

62. “When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It’s hard to keep going when you don’t get any better.”

— Christopher Walken

63. “Movies are terrifically optimistic enterprises.”

— Christopher Walken

64. “I wasn’t a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It’s like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn – the audience is part of it.”

— Christopher Walken

65. “I’ve made three musical movies which is pretty good considering that not many are made but I was lucky in other ways. I came along when independent movies were starting to boom.”

— Christopher Walken

66. “I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn’t refer to anything that’s real. If it’s consistent, if it’s entertaining, if it’s interesting, it justifies its being there.”

— Christopher Walken

67. “To be honest, I was never very ambitious. And I still am not.”

— Christopher Walken

68. “I’ve made one or two movies that I haven’t even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I’m in.”

— Christopher Walken

69. “I became an actor by accident.”

— Christopher Walken

70. “People come up to me all the time in New York. Not for autographs, but to talk about movies, often in a very scientific way.”

— Christopher Walken

71. “I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It’s not a matter of ego. It’s a matter of being disappointed. It’s really a shame. It’s just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.”

— Christopher Walken

72. “I don’t much like being directed. I enjoy being allowed to play.”

— Christopher Walken

73. “Because if I don’t know my lines, I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

— Christopher Walken

74. “Is typecasting really a problem?”

— Christopher Walken

75. “I’ve been to Chicago a lot – it’s one of my favorite places. My wife is from Chicago, and I worked in the theater there a lot.”

— Christopher Walken

76. “I don’t think I’d be a good director because people would ask me, you know, “What is it? What’s going on here? Where should I put the camera?” Or, “What’s my motivation?” And I would say, “Do whatever you want!””

— Christopher Walken

77. “I’ve been very fortunate, because I’ve been involved in things that very often lead to obscurity. I was in some pictures that were not successful whatsoever. I think people admire persistence. People notice that I’m still there.”

— Christopher Walken

78. “I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it’s my face, the way I look.”

— Christopher Walken

79. “I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.”

— Christopher Walken

80. “It’s true in most movies I don’t use my own voice.”

— Christopher Walken

81. “Morning is the best time to see movies.”

— Christopher Walken

82. “My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn’t a job.”

— Christopher Walken

83. “I think early on I knew what I was going to do and it was based a lot on familiarity but it was also because I didn’t have a lot of skills. There was nothing I wanted t be. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I wanted to be in show business.”

— Christopher Walken

84. “When I’m on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it’s very interesting to be around people who aren’t personally invested in you, in any way. They’re just going to the movies.”

— Christopher Walken

85. “I’ll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.”

— Christopher Walken

86. “Even in the limo, I buckle my seatbelt. I got that seatbelt on before the car moves.”

— Christopher Walken

87. “I like to stand in my kitchen with the script on a counter that’s about chest high. Usually I do something else at the same time – make a chicken or slice vegetables – and all day long I just read it over and over and over.”

— Christopher Walken

88. “I try not to worry about things I can’t do anything about.”

— Christopher Walken

89. “I don’t usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I’m older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I’d like that.”

— Christopher Walken

90. “I’ve never made a movie I wasn’t surprised to see.”

— Christopher Walken

91. “I look for good possibilities in movies. I don’t look for perfection.”

— Christopher Walken

92. “They have a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby thing going on.”

— Christopher Walken

93. “When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it’s not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.”

— Christopher Walken

94. “I’ve made movies that I thought were okay, but then I was very good. And sometimes you’re in a movie and you think, ‘I wish more people saw that’ – because you’re good. And it just works out that the movie gets lost. But that’s show business.”

— Christopher Walken

95. “Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.”

— Christopher Walken

96. “I’m not sure I’d write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.”

— Christopher Walken

97. “I’m a better actor now than I ever was, I wish I could have hurried that up, but there’s no way. Anyway, I always wanted to be around for a long time. Like a European actor, I hope I live a long time and that I’m acting until I finish.”

— Christopher Walken

98. “My background is in musical comedy. I didn’t know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.”

— Christopher Walken

99. “The best thing for me is, when I’m not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines.”

— Christopher Walken

100. “There’s an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what’s there.”

— Christopher Walken