Rob Lowe Quotes & Sayings

One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal - like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates. — Rob Lowe

For sure, without question, the writing is better on TV pound for pound than movies because the businesses have changed so much. So all the great writers would rather work for TV, and they do. — Rob Lowe

When I hear that I realize how quickly time passes and how everybody goes on their journeys and they're always unbelievable and they never go where you think they're going to take you and, quite frankly, it also makes me feel a little old. — Rob Lowe

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book. — Rob Lowe

I'll be sober ten years and married nine soon. — Rob Lowe

Tom Ford, who is my all-time favourite, once said to me, 'Here's the thing about dress shirts, Rob. You need white, and you need black.' 'What about blue,' I asked. He said, 'Have you ever seen Cary Grant in a blue dress shirt?' — Rob Lowe

My dad is an attorney. I've always been interested in it. My sons are probably going to law school. — Rob Lowe

There is a movie called 'My Dog Skip,' starring my 'Outsiders' costar Diane Lane. I do not recommend it. If you have a child, particularly one about to leave home, watching this film is to be emotionally waterboarded. — Rob Lowe

I'm a Hollywood pinhead; I don't know about political labels. — Rob Lowe

When I was young and crazy, I was young and crazy. It can be hard enough just to BE in your teens and 20s. Then add fame, money, access, and every single person telling you that you're the greatest person who ever was, and it can be a recipe for disaster. Some people literally don't survive it. — Rob Lowe

When I was a teen idol, I was so goddamn pretty I wouldn't have taken myself seriously. — Rob Lowe

Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself. I don't put it on a platform. I don't campaign about it. It's just something that works for me. It enabled me to really connect with another human being - my wife, Sheryl - which I was never able to do before. — Rob Lowe

I made a conscious effort to focus on television so I could stay in Los Angeles, so I wasn't on a location all over the world doing movies. — Rob Lowe

I loved fun. I spent my whole life in search of fun. I have not given up that part of myself. — Rob Lowe

I've said before that the common perception that all good actors should be good liars is exactly the opposite; only bad actors lie when they act. — Rob Lowe

The Kennedys are our royals. — Rob Lowe

I didn't go to Ivy League schools. I dropped out of college to go into movies. — Rob Lowe

My parents did divorce, but my dad has always been present for me and loving me and my mom as well when she was alive. — Rob Lowe

I've always been involved in politics, since I was 8 or 9 years old. I sold Kool-Aid for McGovern - I could always pick a winner. — Rob Lowe

I was a child of the '80s. — Rob Lowe

I think part of maturity is knowing who you are. — Rob Lowe

I'd like to build a TV company for myself. — Rob Lowe

The president of the United States can't even fire his chef. I'm not kidding. — Rob Lowe

I feel pressures to stay relevant. To stay interesting and interested. To stay at the top of my game and expand. — Rob Lowe

I - you know, I loved politics more as a younger man. — Rob Lowe

I have, on the other hand, felt ill will from various people in the industry and the press. — Rob Lowe

I have had a lot of blessed, interesting things happen to me and have bumped up against some amazing people. — Rob Lowe

My son Matthew's beloved dog is a Jack Russell. His name is Buster. Matthew picked him as a puppy, when he was tiny himself. — Rob Lowe

I think it was Alfred Hitchcock who said 90 percent of successful moviemaking is in the casting. The same is true in life. Who you are exposed to, who you choose to surround yourself with, is a unique variable in all of our experiences and it is hugely important in making us who we are. Seek out interesting characters, tough adversaries and strong mentors and your life can be rich, textured, highly entertaining and successful, like a Best Picture winner. Surround yourself with dullards, people of vanilla safety and unextraordinary ease, and you may find your life going straight to DVD. — Rob Lowe

I've been around for so long, people have their perceptions of me: good, bad or indifferent. — Rob Lowe

If you treat China like a foe, surely she will become one. — Rob Lowe

I always like stories where the egg ends up on my face. — Rob Lowe

I try to be authentically who I am. — Rob Lowe

Fake confidence on the outside often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside. — Rob Lowe

For me, the battle is finding the balance between wanting to spend time with my boys and then having enough perspective to still be the disciplinarian and, like, not be in the best friend business. — Rob Lowe

Somewhere in my callow, misspent youth, I was smart enough to marry my best friend. — Rob Lowe

When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others. — Rob Lowe

I'm thinking of how unexpected and yet oddly preordained life can be. Events are upon you in an instant, unforseen and without warning, and often times marked with disappointment and tragedy, but equally often leading to a better understanding of the bittersweet truth of life. — Rob Lowe

They (teenage boys)don't really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation. — Rob Lowe

I try to hold on to the things I believe to be good and true. Good things happen to good people. Karma is real. There is a larger, better plan for us all if we stay positive, keep pushing and get out of our own way. — Rob Lowe

If you're telling a story, and somebody is going to come out badly, it better be you. — Rob Lowe

If you are fortunate enough to be part of a hit, particularly a transcendent one, all emotional ownership is transferred from you to the audience. They judge it and embrace it; project their own hopes, dreams, and fears onto it; take their personal meaning from its themes, and with these investments it becomes theirs. The significance of your participation pales in comparison to the significance the project has on their imaginations. — Rob Lowe

Guys are really lucky. We become our authentic selves the older we get. — Rob Lowe

I've come to really like Twitter. You really do get to see what I'm about, and I like sharing with my fans. — Rob Lowe

Nothing in life is unfair. It's just life. To the extent that I had any inner turmoil, I had only myself to blame. I also thought of my two boys and what kind of example I hoped to be. I would always want them to take charge of their own futures and not be paralyzed by the comfort and certainty of the status quo or be cowed by the judgment of those on the outside looking in. — Rob Lowe

We all have a suspicion and hope that we've just been part of something special, something that may eventually change our lives. That no one else knows this makes it seem like we are living with a secret that we would like to share, but can't, sort of like having a superpower that's not come online or being president elect. For the moment, our lives proceed as usual, but within a month, we think, everything will change. It's a frustrating, if exciting, disconnect. — Rob Lowe

Look, if you want to wear a blindfold and stumble around your house bumping into things to learn how to play 'blind,' you can do that. A lot of actors do. You can block your hearing and not speak. But great performances are based on truth. And the truth is that you, Rob Lowe, can hear and you can speak. — Rob Lowe

Never compare your insides to someone else's outsides. — Rob Lowe

I liked being a teenager, but I would not go back for all the tea in China. — Rob Lowe

The minute you start making calculations about what people will think of you as a person based on your work as an actor, you're on the road to becoming a bad one. — Rob Lowe

I always wanted that house where everybody wants to go, full of energy, dogs, music, fun. — Rob Lowe

Eleven days before 9/11, I was on a plane with the 9/11 hijackers who were carrying out a dry run. — Rob Lowe

There are so many family dinners you can do. I eventually had to go to them and say, 'Look, I don't do spatula work. I don't do scenes with oven mitts. If you're looking for that, you've got the wrong guy. I'm not doing scenes about casseroles. It's not happening. — Rob Lowe

It's funny what actors take issue with. Some won't do parts where animals are in jeopardy; some won't ever play anyone remotely unlikable - 'Heroes only, please.' Some won't do violence. I have no such qualms. — Rob Lowe

In comedy you have to be willing to not take yourself seriously, you know? I take comedy really seriously, and so to take comedy seriously, you must not, you cannot, ever take yourself seriously. — Rob Lowe

Be funny whenever possible, even if some people don't get it. — Rob Lowe

I don't look back with any bitterness, though there are a couple of judgment calls and some '80s hairdos that I'd like to do over. — Rob Lowe

We always reminisce about how everyone tried to get Diane Lane's attention, to very little success. — Rob Lowe

My thing is personal freedoms: freedoms for the individual to love whom they want, do with what they want. In fact, I want the government out of almost everything. — Rob Lowe

Let me just say this - sometimes being a trailblazer is highly overrated. — Rob Lowe

I am terrible with people's names. — Rob Lowe

I don't think the Internet should be immune to the standing laws of countries. — Rob Lowe

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life ... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things. — Rob Lowe

It's a little bit of a 'if you can't beat 'em - join 'em' mentality for me when I think about Twitter. — Rob Lowe

I'm a political junkie. — Rob Lowe

It took being famous to make me cool, which, by the way, I never forgot. — Rob Lowe

My two sons are the most important things in the world to my wife and I - they are what I build my world around. — Rob Lowe

I have a lot of great memories, but I can't imagine anything more exciting than the life I have now. — Rob Lowe

I've never agreed with the conventional wisdom that 'actors are great liars.' If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be 'actors are terrible liars,' because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What's called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary. — Rob Lowe

I'm what you would call an 'independent moderate.' — Rob Lowe

I've been lucky enough in 'The West Wing' and 'Brothers & Sisters' to talk about the issues that are important to me with none of the awful mud-slinging or public scrutiny you have in politics. — Rob Lowe

You can't build a life on a backstage pass or free swag at Sundance. — Rob Lowe

I am the guy dressing up in, you know, the caveman outfit for the kids' birthday parties. — Rob Lowe

If I had been on 'Ally McBeal,' I would have been seen coming out of the shower on the first show. — Rob Lowe

In acting, there's a type of courage you're recognized for all the time. You lose 100 pounds and play a guy with AIDS, and you get rewarded. But, in life, doing what is courageous is quiet, and no one knows about it. Courage is someone making sacrifices for their family or making selfless decisions for what they hope or feel. — Rob Lowe

Marriage is becoming sort of fake. It's almost like a handbag. Everybody wants the newest, greatest and latest. It becomes an event, and it's definitely a status symbol in our society. I'm not saying it shouldn't be; it absolutely should be - but you shouldn't be focusing on that. — Rob Lowe

Before you could actually have face-lifts, they would pull your skin around the back of your head with rubber bands, where they would tape it. And then you'd have to wear a wig over it to hide the rubber bands. It was not the most comfortable. — Rob Lowe

Can we understand - just for the record, we do need the government for a lot of big ticket items. — Rob Lowe

I couldn't have gotten sober without rehab because I needed the science. — Rob Lowe

Can someone explain the vitriol whenever Ayn Rand comes up? 'Atlas' is the greatest motivator for the individual that I can imagine. — Rob Lowe

Fame is not a natural condition for human beings. — Rob Lowe

Did you eat a lot of paint chips when you were a kid? — Rob Lowe

I like all of John Carpenter's movies. 'The Thing' is my favorite. — Rob Lowe

All things end. They rarely end as we would like them to and often do so before we are ready. We transition in a way that gives our loss honor; we grieve with a love and true appreciation for what we have no longer. It was clear that my mom was ready to go; it was her time. My love of her and my desperation to keep her in my life were of no consequence to that fact, any more than my relentless attempts to improve The Lyon's Den kept it from cancellation. Both personally and professionally I was swamped with the message: Your plan pales compared to the larger one. — Rob Lowe

If somebody else is achieving more than I am, that means I can do it, too. Everybody has the ability to raise themselves up, and my life has been marked by that. — Rob Lowe

I'll never forget one of those things that my father said to me. My father said: 'You know what? We have had so many amazingly positive experiences that we would have never had because you're famous. We can stand to have a couple negatives ones, too.' — Rob Lowe

My greatest regret at the passing of America-hating strongman Hugo Chavez is that he didn't live long enough to party with Dennis Rodman. — Rob Lowe

The '90s were a time of building for me. Building a life that was sober, drained of harmful, wasteful excess and manufacturing in its place a family of my own. — Rob Lowe

When I was filming 'The Outsiders,' my idea of success was getting the next Martin Scorsese movie. — Rob Lowe

The cast of 'Parks & Rec' is just a group of unbelievably nice, humble, down to earth, hilarious friends. — Rob Lowe

Some actors specialize in shooting weapons and punching people. Some have the market on playing buffoons cornered, others specialize in roles that require heavy makeup or outrageous wardrobe. Some trade exclusively in a post-ironic blase attitude. — Rob Lowe

I'd love to serve my country. I would love it. — Rob Lowe

To go from playing Jack Startz in 'Behind the Candelabra' to playing JFK in the same year, I have now operated at the far ends of my range as an actor. — Rob Lowe

Adventure is important in life. Making memories matters. It doesn't have to be a secret sea plane and an historic sports moment. But to have a great life, you need great memories. Grab any intriguing offer. Say yes to a challenge, and to the unknown. Be creative in adding drama and scope to your own life. Work at it, like a job. Money from effort comes and goes. But effort from imagination and following adventure creates stories that you keep forever. And anyone can do it. — Rob Lowe

I like the nexus of Bollywood and Hollywood. I'm actually shocked that there isn't more of a meld between our two industries. — Rob Lowe

The Brat Pack is timeless. — Rob Lowe

I love acting so much that I don't want to give that up. — Rob Lowe

The highest levels of fame in the entertainment business are geared toward keeping the artist disconnected, disinterested and continuing to make product and not developing any sort of 'normal life.' — Rob Lowe

I've had years of psychiatry, and I ask about every six months - it's sort of like getting your oil checked - I ask, 'I'm not an actual narcissist, am I?' The learned men of psychiatry assure me that I meet none of the medical criteria. — Rob Lowe

You can't study the map forever. At some point it's time to start walking; there is only so much daylight. — Rob Lowe