Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Roberts

There is a bruised tenderness hiding inside this line: the insistence that love has a “proper” pace, and that show business is designed to sabotage it. Roberts frames affection as craft, not chemistry. “Properly” suggests standards, patience, attention to another person’s whole self rather than their usefulness. It’s an old-fashioned word with a moral edge, like he’s policing his own impulses after watching too many fast friendships curdle into transactions.

Then he turns the knife: “in this business, you get very wary of people.” The phrasing matters. He doesn’t call anyone evil, he describes a reflex you “get,” as if wariness is acquired like a scar or a professional habit. Acting is intimate work done in public. You build instant closeness on set, you sell sincerity for a living, you’re constantly evaluated, replaced, rebranded. That atmosphere trains suspicion: is this person drawn to me, or to my proximity to a role, a director, a ladder?

The subtext is a quiet conflict between the actor’s instrument and the actor’s defenses. Good performance requires porousness; survival requires boundaries. Roberts is admitting the cost of being “on” all the time: it makes offscreen trust feel naive, even dangerous. The line lands because it refuses glamour. It’s not fame-as-fantasy; it’s fame as an accelerated social world where time - the one ingredient love needs - is always being spent elsewhere.