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I turned down a lot of things - some very lucrative - because I could afford to at that time. That didn't lead to a happy place. I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing.

Richard Schiff

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Richard Schiff
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 27
Actor
Film Actor
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Bethesda
Maryland
Didn
Turned
Place
West
Things
Daughter
Time
Lead
Spend
Happy
Lucrative
Family
Wing
Born
Afford

More quotes by Richard Schiff

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I didn't expect NBC would be at all thrilled about me, because the year before the West Wing I had rejected a pilot at the last minute and got them very upset. I ended up not coming to the casting - in fact it happened four different times because I just wasn't convinced that I wanted to do television.
Richard Schiff
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Playing a TV character for seven years is almost like when you do a play. You live, breathe, and everything else with that character 24-7 for six months or four months or whatever, and that gets very deep in your blood. When you do a TV character for seven years, that's a long time. It becomes a seminal era in your life.
Richard Schiff
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My favourite British spots are any of the beautiful parks, especially on a sunny day such as this, after a long stretch of cold, cloudy and rainy days.
Richard Schiff
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I mean everyone, from Al Pacino to Murphy Guyer, are phenomenal actors.
Richard Schiff
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I imagine an America that can actually change. That we become a nation that prospers again but without pillaging the resources of nations that make their people hate us. That we become a nation that, as the constitution says in its preamble, its very first paragraph, 'promotes the general welfare' of its people.
Richard Schiff
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We are often too late with our brilliance. We are on time delay. The only instant gratification comes in the form of potato chips. The rest will find us by surprise somewhere down the road maybe as we sleep and dream of other things.
Richard Schiff
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Things happen to us and reaction is sometimes tough to measure.
Richard Schiff
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If you go to the real West Wing in the White House it looks like a boring law office there's really not a whole lot going on in series. The moulding is frayed, the carpet is a little dirty it's not exciting.
Richard Schiff
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I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.
Richard Schiff
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Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.
Richard Schiff
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It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere.
Richard Schiff
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I've been very lucky not to have turned down too many roles that I've later regretted.
Richard Schiff
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I have to admit I've rarely been happier in my life. I have been absolutely thrilled to be back in New York and living a block from where I grew up. Just to be back in New York and, quite honestly, away from Hollywood has been an absolute thrill for me. I feel like I'm a real actor again.
Richard Schiff
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I go in to Warner Brothers to test and in the waiting area I saw Allison Janney sitting there, who I did not know but I was a big fan of. I said to myself, Wait a second. These guys might know what they're doing if they're hiring her.
Richard Schiff
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Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.
Richard Schiff
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The political nonsense of network television and the culture of a set and all the problems that that can create, I can take. I can't take betraying the truth of what I'm doing. It cuts to the absolute core of everything that I do in the craft, in this world that I live in.
Richard Schiff
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I would love to be in the position where the role is challenging enough that I need three months to prepare for it and then six months to live the life of character.
Richard Schiff
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Most actors, unless they're big movie stars and can carve out huge chunks of time to focus on one movie that takes six months - the rest of us have to jump around to make ends meet.
Richard Schiff
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I was happy to spend time with my family, get to know my daughter, who was born during The West Wing. I missed her first words. I missed her first steps. I'd leave work before she woke up and got home after she was asleep and didn't really know her. So it was important for that reason to reintroduce myself to the family after all of that hard work.
Richard Schiff
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I fell in love with my wife twenty years ago. I am only now, it seems, getting it through my very thick skull how lucky I am.
Richard Schiff