Top 60 Stanley Tucci Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A dream that you don’t fight for can haunt you for the rest of your life.”

— Stanley Tucci

2. “But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time.”

— Stanley Tucci

3. “If you find that thing you love, it doesn’t necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.”

— Stanley Tucci

4. “I’m a control freak. Totally.”

— Stanley Tucci

5. “If you feel safe then you can go wherever you want to go as an actor.”

— Stanley Tucci

6. “I’m pretty much a character-driven film director and my movies are smaller. I don’t do a lot of coverage. I use lots of master shots.”

— Stanley Tucci

7. “I think it’s important to have a good sense of humor and joke around with your kids. That’s what I do a lot.”

— Stanley Tucci

8. “This is the funny thing about Skype. No one is really looking into the camera. People always looking down because they’re looking at the image. You wish the camera was there in the center.”

— Stanley Tucci

9. “I’ve been playing the father of teenagers for years. People always thought that I was 40 when I was 26. Once you lose your hair, they’re like “Oh! He’s really old now.””

— Stanley Tucci

10. “But usually I’ll wake up and start writing about nine o’clock. I’ll probably write for about three hours, and I’ll do that over the next month and a half.”

— Stanley Tucci

11. “As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It’s an older style of filmmaking.”

— Stanley Tucci

12. “I’m not saying they won’t be bigger projects someday.”

— Stanley Tucci

13. “It is said that Negronis are like breasts: “One is not enough, two is perfect, and three is just too many.” Today I am tempted to see what happens if I drink four.”

— Stanley Tucci

14. “Those moments in between the moments, those are the most interesting. What’s unspoken, the way we talk around things, the way our actions are inconsistent with what we’re feeling, how anger and affection manifest themselves in strange ways at inappropriate times.”

— Stanley Tucci

15. “You have to be serious about what you do but you mustn’t take yourself seriously. That way you’ll be happier and ultimately you’ll be more successful. You’ll be better at what you do.”

— Stanley Tucci

16. “I’d read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell’s stuff for a long time.”

— Stanley Tucci

17. “Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I’m of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.”

— Stanley Tucci

18. “There is a joke that I use all the time. I say it to my kids. I used to say it to my wife. She’d be talking to me about something very serious and then I would just look at her and go “Where are you from originally?” And she would go “Humphhh! C’mon. That’s terrible!””

— Stanley Tucci

19. “I’m actually one who will encourage directors to cut my lines.”

— Stanley Tucci

20. “I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid.”

— Stanley Tucci

21. “Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk – and collect it.”

— Stanley Tucci

22. “People wear shorts to the Broadway theater. There should be a law against that.”

— Stanley Tucci

23. “Every character, no matter who you play, at times is pretending to be somebody else. People have a public face and a private face.”

— Stanley Tucci

24. “Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.”

— Stanley Tucci

25. “I was always attracted to the past as a kid.”

— Stanley Tucci

26. “Ripe bananas are the mark of a good produce section. A good produce section is the mark of a superior grocery store. A superior grocery store is the mark of a good man.”

— Stanley Tucci

27. “And I love doing my own projects; that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

— Stanley Tucci

28. “I have consciously not taken the role of a gangster, which has been offered to me far too many times.”

— Stanley Tucci

29. “My partner, Beth Alexander, and I want to produce smaller films, but commercially viable films that will enable me to make the kinds of movies I want to make.”

— Stanley Tucci

30. “So yes, I hope to act in other people’s movies, big and small, because that’s how I make my living, really.”

— Stanley Tucci

31. “I’ve always considered myself an actor first and foremost.”

— Stanley Tucci

32. “The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved – as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem – must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.”

— Stanley Tucci

33. “Every role is approached in exactly the same way, you have to make it believable and that’s all. Acting is really serious, like, pretending really hard.”

— Stanley Tucci

34. “It’s different if you’re a painter. You can hidethe ones that don’t work. You can’t do that with movies. They tellthe story of who you are at the time, and that’s the wonderful thingabout it.”

— Stanley Tucci

35. “I write in the mornings. During my down time.”

— Stanley Tucci

36. “I didn’t know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn’t believe it – we must change them 10 times a day – each. So that’s 20 diapers a piece a day.”

— Stanley Tucci

37. “Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.”

— Stanley Tucci

38. “The thing is, I’m a very practical filmmaker.”

— Stanley Tucci

39. “I mean, Scorsese’s a genius, and that’s one way of shooting.”

— Stanley Tucci

40. “Sometimes we all make relationships more complicated than they necessarily have to be.”

— Stanley Tucci

41. “I don’t like to move the camera that much anyway.”

— Stanley Tucci

42. “The smaller films just take a longer period of time to build their fan base because people don’t see them as soon as they come out in the theater. They see them, after a period of years.”

— Stanley Tucci

43. “As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don’t get to do when I’m just acting.”

— Stanley Tucci

44. “I’m interested in how people shoot because I have a very specific way of shooting and I’m fascinated by the way other people shoot films, particularly if they’re smart and talented.”

— Stanley Tucci

45. “Sometimes you can’t even find the director on a movie set. Sometimes you don’t want to find the director on a movie set.”

— Stanley Tucci

46. “What’s great is when you’re working with somebody with whom you have a connection, it’s exciting because there’s a shorthand and you trust each other and you have a good time together on the set and so you can go a little farther than you might normally because you’re with somebody that you trust.”

— Stanley Tucci

47. “As a director you have to be careful you don’t over-design the film. You have to be careful that the period aspect does not take over.”

— Stanley Tucci

48. “I was dissatisfied just being an actor.”

— Stanley Tucci

49. “As soon as the actor steps into the role, you probably can cut 50% of the lines because there’s a person there now. And what a person does with their eyes, with their mouth, with their hands, the way they walk into a room, you can probably cut half the scene.”

— Stanley Tucci

50. “I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn’t doing that.”

— Stanley Tucci