Quotes By Greg Kinnear

I was just a quiet kid, really. I wasn't the class clown at all.

I really don't make a concerted effort to try to find a type of role. Maybe I've just done enough of them now where people are like, 'Oh, it's the guy that's in a swirling vortex of despair, send it to Kinnear!' I don't really know, but it does seem to be a recurring theme.

I was 12 when my parents told me we were moving to Lebanon. I remember thinking, 'Leba-who?' I had absolutely no concept of the place.

The irony is that you can't use real rain to make movies.

A man always looks good in a dark suit.

Everybody's family has problems.

We all have to lead double lives, not just celebrities. The face we put on publicly with our jobs and certain situations. I think that's part of the human condition.

There's times when I'll see a show, or something cooking on TV, and think, 'That can really be fun when it's working.' But it's a grind. I did that at NBC, it was five days a week. I was doing 'Talk Soup' and 'Later' at the same time. It's a hard job, more difficult than people realize.

Well, I don't know what image people have of me.

Same job, whether it's comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What's this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what's he trying to say? And what's the volley with all these other people around him?

I don't think there's any connection between my journalism career and my film career. They are two totally different mediums and very different skills.

Part of filmmaking is always a guessing game, and part of it is always a game of trust.

You learn more about a person from the people around that person than you do from the person themselves. We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

'Little Miss Sunshine' snowballed. It was a tiny movie. We shot it in 30 days, and it was really fun to do, but it was one of those small movies that you don't hold out huge hope for.

I'm very leery of show business, having been in Los Angeles for the last 10 years. Buzz is a dangerous thing that I've heard applied to a lot of people that I've since not heard of again.

I've never had a clear road map. When things come along, I benefit.

I like the classics!

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with this idea of opening a restaurant back in Indiana on a little pond. The guests would order their dinner and then take a little boat out with a colored flag on the front of it. When the matching color of the flag on their boat went up on a flag pole, their dinner was ready!

Here's the thing about movies, all movies end up on television. That's their life. Whether you like it or not, I don't care how much money you spend on it, or how big or broad the film is, or who the actors are in it, eventually it's all coming out of the box.

The tragic element of a character is always intriguing I think.

You don't get to pick your partners in families; you get assigned a seat at the table.

My family moved - first to Washington, D.C., and then, in the spring of 1975, to Lebanon, where my father worked as a diplomat at the American embassy. My parents were enthusiastic about the move, so my older brother and I felt like we were off to some place kind of cool.

I don't consider a lot of actors that I really admire movie stars.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

I'm happy to report that everybody whose face I've wanted to punch on Earth has already been punched.