Top 60 Ron Perlman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “War, war never changes.”

— Ron Perlman

2. “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual. I have my own relationship with a being that I consider to be everywhere. All and everything. I don’t need a church or a synagogue or a mosque. I don’t need to kneel down, I don’t need to stand up, I don’t need to be hanging from a thread.”

— Ron Perlman

3. “My whole mantra is, “Go big or go home.” I don’t want to just play a guy who dresses up. I want to play the person who threw down.”

— Ron Perlman

4. “Working at a job that you hate. Having a career and a life that you have no passion for. That’s hell.”

— Ron Perlman

5. “We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects.” In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply “accept” imperfection when it is revealed to us – we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.”

— Ron Perlman

6. “Living off the grid and being kind of an outlaw brings a dangerous reality.”

— Ron Perlman

7. “Fearless people are interesting to watch.”

— Ron Perlman

8. “I love to continue to challenge myself and put myself in situations that are slightly uncomfortable.”

— Ron Perlman

9. “I’m not a social rider. Strictly professional.”

— Ron Perlman

10. “Death is a thief, the grandest perpetrator of larceny of all. It robs the potential of all the things left undone and reimburses the living with bits of memories that, with each day, pass through the fingers like a handful of sand.”

— Ron Perlman

11. “I’ve done millions of mediocre movies. I’ve done way more than my fair share. You do what you gotta do. This is not heart surgery. I’m not curing cancer. I’m just trying to put my kids through school.”

— Ron Perlman

12. “I’ve been busy and not busy, and busy is better. I’ve been busy, but I went through a lot of periods where it was lean for a lot of times.”

— Ron Perlman

13. “My self-confidence didn’t come from my appearance, it came from other things that I did. But certainly not my appearance.”

— Ron Perlman

14. “I live in a bubble. I don’t read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don’t know what people are saying because, well I guess I’m afraid to.”

— Ron Perlman

15. “I’ve certainly been very blessed with opportunity.”

— Ron Perlman

16. “I’m fully aware that things that resonate and become real hits are the exception to the rule, so much so that I’ve wired myself for failure.”

— Ron Perlman

17. “I’m thankful to be breathing, on this side of the grass. Whatever comes, comes.”

— Ron Perlman

18. “I’m continuing to do research into biker culture.”

— Ron Perlman

19. “Cinema to me is like a religion. If I was going to have a religion it would be cinema.”

— Ron Perlman

20. “Once the real you emerges and appears unfettered, naked, and completely in touch with the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you really meet yourself. Then all those things take on a different perspective as well.”

— Ron Perlman

21. “I’m real comfortable around people, and it took a long time for me to evolve to that point.”

— Ron Perlman

22. “I’ve always wanted to have my own studio because this is a way for me to finally take all things that I’ve always dreamt about and actually put them into action.”

— Ron Perlman

23. “I was working more on a primal, instinctive level. And it just seemed to suit me; it seemed to suit my concentration span, it seemed to suit my personal style of performance, and I have fallen in love with film acting.”

— Ron Perlman

24. “I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon. What he hungers for is definitely going to be affected by what he got or didn’t get in those years when he was forming his psyche and his values. So I think villains are made.”

— Ron Perlman

25. “I’ll walk through fire to do what I do because the movie business, when it’s right, is the coolest art form ever invented.”

— Ron Perlman

26. “Distortions control my self-image, like they do for a lot of us. It’s irrational.”

— Ron Perlman

27. “I’m just trying to make up for lost times, and I have total awareness that when the work is coming it doesn’t mean it’s going to continue to come, so I’m taking advantage of this phenomenal period that I’m in now, to its fullest.”

— Ron Perlman

28. “The great thing about arriving at this age is that I don’t even care about my career anymore.”

— Ron Perlman

29. “Literature is nothing more than the expansion of storytelling. Storytelling is obviously the impulse to chronicle something you’ve been through in order to give it its due, to have a catharsis.”

— Ron Perlman

30. “As an actor or anybody as a human being, I feel more and more like I want to spend time doing something significant. Because what’s the alternative? Spend your life wasting your time.”

— Ron Perlman

31. “No matter what line of work you do, success cannot truly be achieved until you own who you are. The most offensive liability then becomes an asset. It makes you perform your best, regardless of the challenges you might face.”

— Ron Perlman

32. “I expect that everything I do will be not watched or not seen. That way, I’m never disappointed when I become flooded with that reality.”

— Ron Perlman

33. “I realized you don’t need to belong to any fuckin’ edifice or ascribe to any dogma to have a relationship with God, to be a good person. You just have to be a good person.”

— Ron Perlman

34. “The only way to grab the attention of the audience is originality. We feed ourselves with franchises that’s the opposite of what makes our culture multidimensional and interesting.”

— Ron Perlman

35. “Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so.”

— Ron Perlman

36. “You start talking about God and a lot of people are going to become very defensive.”

— Ron Perlman

37. “Don’t say a word unless that word is worth saying, and if that word is worth saying, say it beautifully. I learned that from Sean Connery.”

— Ron Perlman

38. “Independent film is almost nonexistent right now, because all the distributers that used to love to put out these little art films are all out of business right now, because it costs so much to open a movie.”

— Ron Perlman

39. “I say yes to almost anything that comes my way.”

— Ron Perlman

40. “I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon.”

— Ron Perlman

41. “I love great animation.”

— Ron Perlman

42. “People are doing sitcoms on stage rather than theater. You go to the theater, and it’s as if you were watching a sitcom at 8:30 on Channel 4.”

— Ron Perlman

43. “I do voicework all the time.”

— Ron Perlman

44. “It’s nice to get paid for therapy rather than having to pay $240 an hour for it.”

— Ron Perlman

45. “I will not do a role that I don’t think I can do, that I’m not interested in, where there’s no humanity, that doesn’t have any kind of handle for me at all because I know I’ll just stink the joint up.”

— Ron Perlman

46. “Every job has a unique situational circumstance.”

— Ron Perlman

47. “I’ve never worked with a tail, that I can remember. But there’s so much I can’t remember.”

— Ron Perlman

48. “I’m kind of one of these guys who wants to play everything once before it’s all over.”

— Ron Perlman

49. “I don’t think that I’ve had a career like anyone else’s, but there are hosts and hosts of actors whose careers I admire.”

— Ron Perlman

50. “I love showing up and giving a performance without the benefit of a lot of rehearsal or dissection. It’s fun to me to act on a kind of instinctual level and go straight for the performance.”

— Ron Perlman