Vince Vaughn

I was lucky I always got along with girls. It was never like a big deal. I had a lot of girls that I was friends with that I wasn’t sexual with. I think having two older sisters made me comfortable like that. I just like people, so I can just go up and say whatever.

[On taking a pay cut to make a documentary] I could keep trying to do the same kind of comedies. You know how it’s going to go, and you can get an audience with it, but then I feel like a hamster on a wheel.

[On hooking up romantically with co-stars] It’s understandable. You’re in situations with an actress where you’re supposed to be intimate, physical, and vulnerable with each other, and sometimes feelings get crossed. It’s like you’re away at summer camp and it seems to make sense, but when you go back home, the reality is that it may not be a situation you want to be in.

If I’m not interested in a woman, I’m straight-forward. Right after sex, I usually say, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Thanks for coming over!’

I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it’s all make-believe.

The best thing as an actor, the best tool you have is your imagination. That you kind of take things that have happened, and then go and expand on them. However small it is, you use your imagination to create what that reality is. There’s something kind of fun when you’re not old enough to do anything, driving a car, getting into a bar, drinking, going to a party you don’t belong to, something when you’re young in that innocent way.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution – such call I good books.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him to the public.

An autobiography is not about pictures; it’s about the stories; it’s about honesty and as much truth as you can tell without coming too close to other people’s privacy.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

A multitude of books distracts the mind.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must lay it down and commence living on its hint… What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Why not blame the libraries? They’re full of violent books.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.