Best 168 quotes of Harrison Ford on MyQuotes

A bad guy in a movie has a lot of latitude for acting. He can walk up the wall, crawl across the ceiling, go piss in the corner and everybody will say, "Fantastic!" But somebody's going to have to catch that sucker. Somebody's going to have to play the guy who gets him in the end. And that's a better part.

Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team. I never feel competitive about acting.

Acting was a way out at first. A way out of not knowing what to do, a way of focusing ambitions. And the ambition wasn't for fame. The ambition was to do an interesting job.

[After playing Indiana Jones and Han Solo] hero image concerns me a little, though not for my sake. All it means to me is that I have a responsibility not to get caught doing anything terrible and thereby jeopardise my credentials. Not that I do terrible things, like running over dogs or anything like that. It just makes you think twice before you say or do things in public.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

American Graffiti was the first movie where the director let me have any input. It was the first time anyone ever listened to me. George thought my character should have a crew cut, but I wasn't happy with that idea. I'd always had pretty long hair back then - in college, particularly - so I told George my character should wear a cowboy hat. George thought about it and he remembered a bunch of guys from Modesto, California, who cruised around, like my character, and wore cowboy hats, so it turned out that it actually fit the movie.

Am I grumpy? I might be. But I think maybe sometimes it's misinterpreted.

An icon means nothing to me. I don't understand what it means to anybody actually. It seems like a word of convenience. It seems to attend to the huge success of certain kinds of movies that I did, but there's no personal utility in being an icon. I don't know what an icon does, except stand in a corner quietly accepting everyone's attention. I like to work, so there's no utility in being an icon.

As a matter of fact, that was a bit of a problem for me at the beginning of my career - the problem of identification. In The Conversation I played a character who was gay, so nobody recognised me from American Graffiti. When I did Apocalypse Now, after Star Wars, I played an intelligence officer of the American army. George Lucas saw the footage I had done and didn't recognise me until halfway through the scene.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures].

Behind every great man is a woman. Telling him he's not so hot.

Bikes and planes aren’t about going fast or having fun; they’re toys, but serious ones.

[ Chadwick Boseman] was not a baseball player. He spent, I don't know, countless hours, many months, working two sessions a day with professional pro coaches to develop the baseball skills that he needed.

Chadwick Boseman work as an actor, I think, is truly remarkable, and I had a great time working with him.

For some directors, I'm the actor from hell.

Hard work and a proper frame of mind prepare you for the lucky breaks that come along -- or don't.

Harrison Ford may be getting old, but he can fight like a 28 year old man.

Hell of a thing when a man's got good health, plenty of money and absolutely nothing to do.

Henry: Well I'm sorry about your head though, but I thought you were one of them. Indiana: Dad, they come in through the doors.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

I accrued anger from people's low opinion of me and my work, and for the work I might be capable of.

I believe that the racial injustice which existed such a short time ago probably would have persisted longer if the color barrier had not been broken in baseball.

I came across the script [42], and I read it, and I said, "I really want to do this." And when I had my agent call, they said, ah, you know, it's not what they're looking for. So, OK. And then I let it go for a while, and then it just kept gnawing at me, so I kept pushing.

I could take Sean Connery in a fight... I could definitely take him.

I do not go to the gym. I do not train. I am not that careful about what I eat. I cannot give you any advice about keeping fit. The best advice I can give is choose your parents wisely.

I don't do a huge amount of physical activity. I play tennis, I work out sporadically, and I eat well and take care of myself.

I don't do stunts - I do running, jumping and falling down. After 25 years I know exactly what I'm doing.

I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?'

I don't mind playing older characters. I find it interesting. There are parts I couldn't have got when I was 30 years old. So, it continues to interest me in the same way that it always did.

I don't take trouble at all to conform a screenplay to my iconography. I don't say, "We can't do that - the audience wouldn't accept it." I try to take the limitations of what is required to play a leading character and then screw with them.

I don't think I have something that's pronounceable as a philosophy. ... When it was fashionable to say, "May the Force be with you," I always said, "Force yourself." ... I'll say again then, "The Force is within you. Force yourself.

I don't think I've mastered anything. I'm still wrestling with the same frustrations, the same issues, the same problems as I always did. That's what life is like.

I don't think nostalgia is very useful to me. There is a story to be told, there's behaviour to create or to bring to the screen that will help tell that story, and nostalgia is just not really a big part of my emotional package.

I don't want to be a slave to electronic devices. I don't want to be connected to my friends. I don't want to send snapshots of my dog and cute pictures of my family life to my friends and family. I don't want to be liked, by pushing a button. I use all of this technology to basically replace devices that I had in the past which worked just fine.

I enjoyed carpentry, and it was very good to me for 12 years.

If I were a serious person, I'd probably have a real job.

I found out that drama was a fascinating exercise as a way to get out of my self and into somebody else's head.

If people recognize me when I'm out in public, I'm very nice to them. I'm very nice to people even when they don't recognize me. I don't even mind if people come up to me while I'm eating dinner, but if they recognize me while I'm having sex, I refuse to sign autographs.

If you're asking me to acknowledge that I've gotten older, I can do that.

If you're going to define me properly, you must think in terms of my failures as well as my successes.

I get an opportunity to communicate with the audience about the movie that I've made. I get the chance to bring attention to the film that I've made. I care a lot about the movies that I make. I want them to reach an audience, and I want them to be successful. I promote nearly everything that I do, unless I've got some bad taste in my mouth.

I get mad when people call me an action movie star. Indiana Jones is an adventure film, a comic book, a fantasy.

I had never even thought about doing something that I'd never done before or proving anything.

I had no expectation of the level of adulation that would come my way. I just wanted to make a living with a regular role in a television series.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, so nothing of what I was studying seemed to fit. I know now that I should have taken advantage of that time and that I missed a great deal of the opportunity to educate myself.

I had the idea that the film would be much better served by a Branch Rickey lookalike than a Harrison Ford lookalike. I didn't want the audience to go into the film thinking that they knew me from some previous experience in a movie.

I have an attorney. I'm looking to be rich like Harrison [Ford]. I'm trying to have planes and do all that stuff.

I have children. I have other concerns. I have other focuses. I really feel very sympathetic and I would love to be able to help but I don't see this as the opportunity, having done 'Extraordinary measures', for me to suddenly leap on a soap box and begin to talk about the pharmaceutical industry or the desperate plight of sick children. I do what I can in my world but I don't have the bona fides to do that right now.

I haven't purposefully set out to play heroes. I'm interested in playing the character who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. But he's really either just saving himself or acting in the service of something that's important to him.