Top 70 Liev Schreiber Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Acting is like an addiction – once you start, you can’t stop.”

— Liev Schreiber

2. “There’s the private persona and the public persona and the two shall never meet.”

— Liev Schreiber

3. “My publicist told me not to talk about politics but, yes, I think we have a president who stole the election.”

— Liev Schreiber

4. “It’s good to overexpose yourself with work. But don’t expose yourself too much with the press.”

— Liev Schreiber

5. “I grew up in the Lower East Side of New York.”

— Liev Schreiber

6. “I’m misrepresented as a scary person. I’m not. It’s all about my size and my eyebrows.”

— Liev Schreiber

7. “You can think about your career or you can think about your job. I like to think about my job.”

— Liev Schreiber

8. “Pitching. You’re pitching yourself constantly which is probably why there are so many plays about sales. I think also it’s like life.”

— Liev Schreiber

9. “I get panic attacks in big crowds.”

— Liev Schreiber

10. “A lot of times in Hollywood you’re as good as your last job.”

— Liev Schreiber

11. “I am struggling, though. It’s f-cking hard. So little sleep. It’s 23 hours and 59 minutes of exhaustion. They do one little thing in that last minute that is just so compelling and fascinating that it makes the other 23 hours and 59 minutes worthwhile.”

— Liev Schreiber

12. “Someone very smart once said to me, “Steal, don’t borrow.” So if there’s anything good in anything anyone else does, it’s fair game. I think that everything I’ve ever done at some point is part of someone else’s legacy.”

— Liev Schreiber

13. “Flaws reveal a lot about a character and who people are. The flawed elements of a character are where I find their humanity. Those are the things I tend to identify with – the weaknesses. I don’t know why, but I identify with struggle more than with success.”

— Liev Schreiber

14. “I am so used to being able to express myself from being an actor. So when people don’t understand me, I’m just completely lost.”

— Liev Schreiber

15. “Don’t hit people; don’t let it get you too angry; remember that everything you do can and will be used against you. And take a breath and have some perspective.”

— Liev Schreiber

16. “Call me communist, but I think that’s something that everyone, regardless of their family’s income, has a right to, and I was fortunate enough to have a mother who felt that way as well.”

— Liev Schreiber

17. “I get very nervous around famous people and I get nervous around beautiful women.”

— Liev Schreiber

18. “And you know, I hate to admit this, but I don’t always think in terms of Shakespeare. When I eat, I do. When I’m at a restaurant, I’ll think, ‘Hmm, what would Macbeth have ordered?’”

— Liev Schreiber

19. “I actually loved Winnipeg. Everyone told me I was going to hate it, but it was great.”

— Liev Schreiber

20. “The skill set for hockey is so specific to skating and if you haven’t been skating as a kid it’s impossible to play – and I wasn’t a skater.”

— Liev Schreiber

21. “I’m drawn to people who share that sense of loss. All actors are trying to repair damaged relationships. I think that might be why I’ve been drawn to other actors.”

— Liev Schreiber

22. “You watch a hockey game, and the hand-eye coordination and the speed is really miraculous; how those guys track the puck alone, just following it with their eyes.”

— Liev Schreiber

23. “The funny thing is that I write and I act a lot about being Jewish, but I don’t really think about it as a regular person.”

— Liev Schreiber

24. “I live with an 18-month-old Jack Russell named Chicken. He moved in about 15 months ago, and it was very hard at first because I work a lot and he doesn’t.”

— Liev Schreiber

25. “You always have to create the character from the ground up.”

— Liev Schreiber

26. “I think people respond to truthful, simple narrative, and the more you try to dress it up to try and do something else, the harder it is for people to relate to.”

— Liev Schreiber

27. “I really don’t think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood.”

— Liev Schreiber

28. “Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.”

— Liev Schreiber

29. “Hamlet is a remarkably easy role. Physically it’s hard because it tends to be about three hours long and you’re talking the whole time. But it’s a simple role and it adapts itself very well, because the thing about Hamlet is, we all are Hamlet.”

— Liev Schreiber

30. “No, I grew up admiring people who played ice hockey.”

— Liev Schreiber

31. “I think it’s really, really important to mix it up as an actor, to try to get as much kind of varied experience as you can, not only for your own personal growth as an actor but for the audience to keep them guessing about what you’re going to do.”

— Liev Schreiber

32. “I’m kind of an obsessive-compulsive person, like, neat obsessive.”

— Liev Schreiber

33. “Style, no matter how outrageous it is, is still an expression of someone’s personality. And my personality is somewhere stuck in the classics.”

— Liev Schreiber

34. “I want to forget what I’ve learned about the character, but the reality is that you can’t, because you’ve absorbed it. It’s there in that moment when you need it. The hard part is to trust it.”

— Liev Schreiber

35. “I’m a typically lazy person. It is sort of characteristic of actors.”

— Liev Schreiber

36. “You should never ask actors about politics.”

— Liev Schreiber

37. “Ever since I was a little kid I was obsessed with films, and I always wanted to make them.”

— Liev Schreiber

38. “There’s something cathartic about swearing 150 times after spending ten hours in the editing room.”

— Liev Schreiber

39. “I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can’t do for some reason are the South African and Australian.”

— Liev Schreiber

40. “You are what you know, as an actor, so you gotta try to know as much as you possibly can.”

— Liev Schreiber

41. “That’s one of the benefits of working on big budget films. You work with people who have a lot of experience and you get to learn a lot.”

— Liev Schreiber

42. “I manage to hide in my movies.”

— Liev Schreiber

43. “Actors, you know, they’re often awkward people in real life.”

— Liev Schreiber

44. “If I’m doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.”

— Liev Schreiber

45. “I love having that creative discussion where, at the end of the day, you both feel better for having done it. Maybe it’s a typically Jewish thing, where you sort of go at each other.”

— Liev Schreiber

46. “I’ve always been more interested in the audience than I have in the plays. I like that idea of all those people sitting in the dark together. It’s kind of fun.”

— Liev Schreiber

47. “I was a writer. I just wasn’t a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I’d be a better actor than I would a playwright.”

— Liev Schreiber

48. “The celebrity mill is so active these days that actors can make careers out of being themselves, and I don’t know that I want to. I think I’m just figuring out how to make a career out of not being myself. It’s hard.”

— Liev Schreiber

49. “I find that the most interestingly written parts happen to be the bad guys.”

— Liev Schreiber

50. “Everyone assumes that novelists are smarter and more interesting. They’re generally smarter and more interesting, but they’re often very short. So it kind of cancels all the smart and interesting stuff out.”

— Liev Schreiber