Daily Inspiration Quote by Danny DeVito

DeVito’s “edge” isn’t the romantic cliff of tortured genius; it’s the working actor’s edge: the spot where a role might fail, a joke might land wrong, a scene might tip from charming to grotesque. Coming from a performer whose career is built on lovable menace and bodily comic truth, the line reads like a manifesto for choosing risk over polish. He’s not selling danger for its own sake. He’s describing the practical exhilaration of not knowing, on set or onstage, whether the audience will follow you into the weird.

The repeated negatives - “not safe,” “not in the middle of the road” - do double duty. They reject blandness, but they also hint at an industry that rewards it. Hollywood’s “middle” is where careers get protected: familiar beats, focus-grouped likability, the kind of competence that never embarrasses anyone and rarely surprises anyone. DeVito’s subtext is that safety is a form of self-censorship, and self-censorship is the enemy of specificity. His best characters (the schemers, the cranks, the oddballs) work because they commit fully, even when the commitment makes them a little ugly.

The tag “at least for me, anyway” is classic DeVito: humility as a pressure-release valve. It softens what could sound preachy, and it frames risk as a personal creative method rather than a universal law. That small shrug is also a flex: he’s earned the right to say that playing it safe is overrated, because his success has come from refusing to sand off the sharp edges.