A famous American screen and stage actor, Christopher Walken was born and raised in New York City. Always interested in the art of acting since his childhood years, he imitated Elvis Presley, his style icon. Christopher worked at many odd jobs during his childhood years and did acting side by side. He started his career in the 1950s as a child actor appearing in small roles in many films and TV series’/shows. With the film ‘The Anderson Tapes’, Christopher started his official acting career and mostly played small roles in many major films. Overtime he started getting better roles in acclaimed films such as ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘True Romance’ and ‘The Deer Hunter’. The Oscar Award winning actor is also known for his intellect and a sharp sense of humour. We have collected the best Christopher Walken quotes on family, life, acting, fame and performances taken from his talk show episodes and interviews.
If you do movies that are modestly budgeted, the way they finance them is they figure out how they can sell them.
Christopher Walken
If you play a king, it's better if everybody treats you like a king.
Christopher Walken
I don't have kids. Maybe that's kept me young. I have a wife for almost 50 years and she looks after me a little bit like I was seven years-old.
Christopher Walken
I've made quite a number of movies that I've never even seen and I've made some movies that I thought were good that nobody saw... Sometimes they end up on television.
Christopher Walken
I've never made a movie I wasn't surprised to see.
Christopher Walken
Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.
Christopher Walken
As an actor I'm rather hit and miss, I throw a lot out there, and some of it works and some of it doesn't. But this is a nice part.
Christopher Walken
Older actors, and women in particular, are getting more opportunities. It pleases me, its very good news for us. They say that people are living longer, and maybe it's just that there's more of us out there.
Christopher Walken
You never forget how to dance. It's just a matter of your bones working and things like that.
Christopher Walken
Sometimes a certain innocence is good, but not about yourself.
Christopher Walken
Death is wonderful because you can't think about it. How are you gonna think about it?
Christopher Walken
I know that whenever I think about death, I come up against a stone wall.
Christopher Walken
One of the difficult things about being an actor is to stick around.
Christopher Walken
I've made a couple of movies in the jungle, and I don't want to go back to the jungle.
Christopher Walken
I have always refused to do something that has offended me. I have been offered potential roles that are totally vulgar.
Christopher Walken
I want to make movies on a soundstage. They close the door and it's nighttime, daytime. If it has to rain, they make the rain. That's what I like.
Christopher Walken
I was never a child actor. I was a child performer.
I play disturbed people a lot, but always with a bit of distance or tongue-in-cheek. Most of the villains I play are essentially harmless.
Christopher Walken
I think I'm getting a little bit of Alzheimer's. Just a little.
Christopher Walken
People think that my favorite roles to do are villains, but I find comedy to be the most challenging and rewarding.
Christopher Walken
I love spaghetti. And I like to cook spaghetti. And I used to eat it every day. I weighed thirty pounds more than I do now. You can't - you can't do that.
Christopher Walken
There probably aren't a lot of actors my age who tap dance.
Christopher Walken
They have a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby thing going on.
Christopher Walken
The thing about cooking is it's so interesting to watch. I don't know why, but if you go to somebody's house and they're making something, they usually say interesting things while they're cooking.
Christopher Walken
Well, I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer and then I got a job as an actor.
Christopher Walken
I think that if I had grown up and had been in show business and the movies twenty five, thirty years earlier, I think I would have made a lot more musical movies.
I think the fact that I was raised in show business, in New York City, in the '50s, that's affected my personality to the point that I'm a little different.
Christopher Walken
To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.
I tend to play mostly villains and twisted people. Unsavory guys. I think it's my face, the way I look.
Christopher Walken
I've made three musical movies which is pretty good considering that not many are made but I was lucky in other ways. I came along when independent movies were starting to boom.
Christopher Walken
The best thing for me is, when I'm not working, is to be at home and to have a script or two scripts is better, and to be just walking around the house and just thinking about the lines.
Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.
Christopher Walken
Is typecasting really a problem?
Christopher Walken
My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.
Christopher Walken
My background is in musical comedy. I didn't know I was going to be an actor. But all my points of reference have to do with musical comedy and in being kind of a showoff.
Christopher Walken
I have been in movies that I thought I wasn't very good in.
Christopher Walken
I became an actor by accident.
Christopher Walken
My father passed away a couple of years ago, but he was very old. He was almost a 100 years old. And, you know, he had a very good life. He came to America and he had a good life.
Christopher Walken
Usually directors hire me because I'm what they are looking for. But once in a while, and it's very rare, they will hire me and then try to make me over.
When I was a kid I joined the circus. I did that. It is true. But it's not like you think. There was a guy, he had his own circus. His name was Carol Jacobs and he owned it. It was a small thing.
Christopher Walken
Some people can do things and get away with it. Comics are famously like that. Why is it that some guys can say the most horrible things and it's not offensive, it's funny?
Christopher Walken
By the time I was 7, I did walk-ons, catalogue modeling, you name it. In the Queens where I grew up, you didn't go bowling on Saturday; you went to dancing school.
Christopher Walken
My background is in musical comedy.
Christopher Walken
I've made movies that we're very successful that we're a complete surprise, and I've made movies that I thought we're going to be very successful that, you know.
Christopher Walken
I come from a part of New York that was almost entirely immigrants. I was born in America, but all of my friends' parents, everybody's parents, including my own, had come to America from Europe.
Christopher Walken
I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy - or, I don't tend to get those parts. I've tended to play eccentrics. I've played a lot of villains, of course.
Christopher Walken
I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don't think you can think about that. I don't think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.
Christopher Walken
I play a lot of, maybe a little bit, cartoonish people. I've been a Bond villain, and I play a lot of villains, people who want to take over something.
Christopher Walken
I think the fact that I grew up in show business had a real effect on my personality. If you were born in New York during the golden age of television, and you grew up on Broadway, that marks you.
Christopher Walken
When videotape came so a lot of movies that I do have a kind of afterlife in video. Things where movies that I do would come and go; they still come and go but you can go rent them and see them on TV.
Christopher Walken
I think that sometimes when they see me in a movie they expect me to be something nasty. I mean, I play a lot of villains and you show up and they think maybe... That's why it's good to defy expectations sometimes.
Christopher Walken
I think that a good movie creates its own world, and that world needn't refer to anything that's real. If it's consistent, if it's entertaining, if it's interesting, it justifies its being there.
Christopher Walken
I think if you do something effectively whether you're the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you'll get asked to play that part again.
Christopher Walken
I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent.
Christopher Walken
Onstage I have a natural chutzpa that audiences like. I'm out there.
Christopher Walken
It's very hard to get a movie made. You could spend your life reading scripts that never got made.
Christopher Walken
I think that weddings have probably been crashed since the beginning of time. Cavemen crashed them. You go to meet girls. It makes sense.
Obvious things like The Deer Hunter. After that happened, the scripts got better. Opportunities happened.
Christopher Walken
A job leads to a job, just like anything else, and it became apparent that this was probably what I was going to keep doing.
Christopher Walken
I became an actor kind of by accident. I was in musical theater and I got a job as an actor in a play and kept going. But I never set out to be an actor; it happened over time.
Christopher Walken
I live sort of in the country and I like that. It's very quiet, it's beautiful.
In England, and all over Europe, and all over the world, actors act until they die. They get old, really old, and they're still working. They just keep doing it.
Christopher Walken
I have made a number of movies that I have never seen. It's not a matter of ego. It's a matter of being disappointed. It's really a shame. It's just as difficult to make a movie that no one cares about as to make a hit.
It's true in most movies I don't use my own voice.
Christopher Walken
All actors do what they do differently, and it doesn't matter.
Christopher Walken
I grew up in music theater playing to the audience - singing and dancing and showing off. That's really my background. But the camera's different. I think I'm more at home on stage.
I suppose in order to succeed at something you have to be very persistent. I've never done that.
Christopher Walken
I have boxes full of stuff. Most actors do have a trunk full of stuff, paintings or scripts. It never comes to anything.
Christopher Walken
I don't need to be made to look evil. I can do that on my own.
Christopher Walken
My father was a lesson. He had his own bakery, and it was closed one day a week, but he would go anyway. He did it because he really loved his bakery. It wasn't a job.
Christopher Walken
I got [Muhammad Ali's boxing shorts] for $40 at an auction. Nobody wanted them. I have them framed in my house.
Christopher Walken
There are places I don't want to go. Making movies on tops of mountains, in the desert, playing scenes while icy torrents of rivers rush by. The jungle. It's very uncomfortable.
Christopher Walken
Morning is the best time to see movies.
Christopher Walken
I don't usually get to play fathers or grandfathers or uncles. Now that I'm older, maybe I can play people closer to myself. I'd like that.
Christopher Walken
I don't have a lot of hobbies. I don't play golf. I don't have any children. Things that occupy people's time. I just try to take jobs.
A man can be an artist... in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasey's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece.
To be honest, I was never very ambitious. And I still am not.
Christopher Walken
Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious.
Christopher Walken
It's not necessarily how many minutes you're on screen, it's the material you have. It's more important what it is you have to do than the amount of time you're there.
Christopher Walken
In rehearsal you have a good accident that you can repeat.In the movies if you have a good accident you hope the camera's running.
Christopher Walken
No, but way before that, I've been doing little dances in movies for years. Yeah, that was an amazing chance. You know, at my age to be able to do a music dance video, very unusual.
Christopher Walken
I've made one or two movies that I haven't even seen, because they were never released. I have made things that I never even saw. But I will always go see the movie I'm in.
Christopher Walken
Well, you know what they say. A bullet always tells the truth.
Christopher Walken
I don't much like being directed. I enjoy being allowed to play.
Christopher Walken
I look for good possibilities in movies. I don't look for perfection.
Christopher Walken
Usually in the first performances I'm completely panicked. And I pull myself together. By the time you get to the end of the play, you really start to have fun.
It's impossible for me to play a part without thinking about the audience.
Christopher Walken
There's an impression that actors make a lot of choices. I just take what's there.
Christopher Walken
I have a lot of trouble with scripts. I have a lot of trouble imagining things while I'm reading them.
Christopher Walken
I like to go to work, and also, I don't have any kids. I don't have any hobbies. I don't like to travel. So going to work is kind of it.
Christopher Walken
If you're an actor, a hard thing is to stick around, to stay viable. I try to do that by taking the opportunity to do something different every once in awhile.
