David: Whenever Mulder leaves Scully, she does something interesting, like has a baby. Whenever Scully leaves Mulder, he just fiddles around in his underwear and dribbles a basketball.
-Us

David: I wanted Mulder to go through an archetypal journey: starting from a position of innocence, which is one of trusting his father--the elders, in mythology-- being a good boy and a good son, to being an outcast, feeling like his father is Darth Vader, then going to almost as innocent a phase, in which he believes that everyone's a liar, and everyone's out to get him, then maturing to a kind of enlightened cynic.
-Vanity Fair, June 1998

David: [S]ometimes I want Mulder to have a life outside of the investigative part and outside of the quest for a sister. I know that is the main spine of the character, that is what drives him, but I'd also like to take him into other areas, and the obvious way would be to either be with Scully romantically, or another woman. I'd like to see something like that, just because as an actor that's interesting to play.
-Cult Times

David: It's important that Mulder is a joke to everybody else. What I like most about Mulder is his integrity, his lack of interest in what other people think about him. That's what makes him a hero.
-Los Angeles Times

David: What I liked about Mulder was his quality of not caring what other people thought of him. He was very independent. He wasn't interested in women. I liked that. He had kind of an intellectual quest, but not a sexual quest. That was the challenge of Mulder. Here was a guy that got almost sexually excited about aliens. And I wanted to be able to do that!
-CLEO, May 1996

David: I've argued some against every emotional moment being linked back to Mulder's sister. I don't like that. I think it was important to set that up as my character's foundational interest in the supernatural. My sister disappeared, was abducted, I think, by aliens. But we have to get beyond that. It's not realistic in a person's life to think that everything goes back to one event. So hopefully we'll get away from just relating everything back to my sister and get more into, maybe a relationship with a woman.
-Pyrdonian Renegade

David: Mulder is a cynical innocent. He believes in little green men. He believes in Santa Claus. He believes in everything. He's like a child. -USA Today

David: The most important thing for me about Mulder was the fact that he didn't care about what anybody else thought he was doing. So he had a real 'screw you' strength. He basically was going to do what he was going to do, which in most people's eyes was kind of a stupid endeavor for somebody with some of the talent he had, someone who was a respected young FBI agent to all of a sudden devote all his energy to chasing UFOs. Sometimes an audience may lose sight of that, because Mulder's always right, or at least 90 percent of the time we see that although he doesn't win, what he's saying is true. So it's easy to forget that he's kind of a loser, kind of a very odd guy who's made a really odd choice with his life.
-The X-Files Official Movie Magazine

David: One of the things I like about [Mulder] is that he's very cerebral, but he can get out there and jump on a train and run around and get beat up.
-The X-Files Official Movie Magazine

David: [Y]ou do a character for five years, every day, 14 hours a day, 10 months out of a year, and the walls that you've built up between yourself and this character necessarily come down. Like I bleed through into Mulder all the time, just because I can't be as vigilant as I was in the beginning. In the beginning, I really had a sense of who Mulder was and who I was, but you get so damned tired, and eventually bits of David creep in that I don't necessarily want to be in, but there they are because I wasn't watching.
-Interview with Charlie Rose

David: Most casting is done the moment the person walks in the door. Actors hate to realize that. In one way, it lets you off the hook because it doesn't matter what you did in the audition. It's rare that you can sway somebody that 'I am this guy' if he or she didn't think so when you walked in the room. So obviously when I walked in the room, I had something of his conception of Mulder. . . . Probably just some kind of intelligence and humor, I think, a combination. I don't really know. I just remember I wanted to bring out the humanity in the character. I didn't want him to be a mad scientist. I didn't want him to be Dr. Who. I wanted him to be somebody--if you were going to believe these things that we were going to be doing in the show--I wanted to have somebody as seemingly trustworthy and not kooky in any way, so I just played him straight.
-Interview with Charlie Rose

David: What I love about Mulder is that he's so inept. It's been five years and he's not solved one case. He spends hundreds of thousands of tax-payers' dollars and his success rate is zero. He should have been fired by now. There's never been anyone brought to trial, let alone put behind bars. And he's killed lots of people and jeopardized that lives of so many innocent people. He's also rented a lot of cars. Yeah, the rental company must really value his business.
-Time Out

David: He is a loser. Basically, Mulder just never succeeds. He doesn't get what he wants. He doesn't win fist fights. He doesn't get the girl. I like him as a hero because I always intended to play him as a guy who doesn't win, but who seems to win. That is, I think, a difficult thing to do. People at home see that Mulder is right, so it's all kind of skewed in his favor. They've seen what he sees. They know that he's right, that his quest is good and moral. In that sense, he's more of a straight-up hero. In the world and in his job, though, he never really succeeds.
-Sci-Fi TV

David: One of the things I like about Mulder is his ability to make fun of himself. I find that to be what I like in a person, that they have a perspective to step out of a situation and see how ridiculous they are being.
-Houston Chronicle

David: I find it exhausting, as a performer, to have to `believe' in so much. Sometimes I would like not to believe in some things. I believe in aliens, I believe in vampires, I believe in it all.
-Houston Chronicle

David: I do not think that Mulder trusts any one other than Scully. He's very solitary. She is the only one who takes him seriously. I don't know if they're in love. In a way, their relationship is deeper than that, because they cannot live without each other. When I play a scene with Gillian Anderson, there are always little looks between us which mean 'what do you think about what's happening?' It's a little as if we have secrets between us. Everything is conveyed by communication beyond words. Perhaps, after all, you could interpret that as love. But from that to imagining Mulder and Scully as a couple? I don't think that's going to happen one day. The intrigue is so intense in episodes of The X-Files and the script so focused on the paranormal, that I have difficulty seeing Mulder and Scully hiding somewhere, waiting for the villains, talking about the problem of the lavatory seat being left up all the time. That's for Dynasty!
-Studio (France)