Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Hopkins - Page 2

Oh yes. I'm an actor, so I just learn my lines, and show up and do it. I gave it a little bit of thought.

I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time.

I can't stand directors who try to micro-manage everything. When it happens these days I just walk off set, saying if they don't like the way I'm doing it they can get someone else.

I'm one of the slowest drivers on the road. I mosey along. If you're doing anything too fast, including living life too fast, that creates sudden death. If I have to be somewhere on time, I make sure I leave early enough.

I like to take it easy.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

The magical, supernatural force that is with us every second is time. We can't even comprehend it. It's such an illusion, it's such a strange thing.

I'm not a health freak. I just work out every day.

We're always looking over our shoulders, 'what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one - am I making the right career move?' When you're young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

I come from - I came from Wales, and it's a strong, butch society. We were in the war and all that. People didn't waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is get on with it. I don't waste time being soft. I'm not cold, but I don't like being, wasting my time with - life's too short.

The Welsh people have a talent for acting that one does not find in the English. The English lack heart.

It's such a pleasant surprise when you come on set and you find someone in charge like Ken Branagh or James Ivory. You know that you're going to do a day's work and at the end of it, it's going to be good.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I'm a philistine. I like the good life too much; I'm not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I love roller coasters. I don't get a chance often, but I've gone to Magic Mountain and gone on the rides. I love roller coasters.

I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.

I've got a great sense of humor.

My father wasn't a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher - one of those Victorians, hard as iron - but my dad was tough enough.

I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

I'm the slowest driver in the world.

I have dual citizenship, it just so happens I live in America.

This industry has been really good to me. It's been a great life. I'm not through yet. I'm ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

I wouldn't use the word 'scared' for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.

I think a certain amount of stress in life is good. The stress of just working, which takes effort - I think it keeps you going.

I don't know why they gave me a knighthood - though it's very nice of them - but I only ever use the title in the U.S. The Americans insist on it and get offended if I don't.

I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

Jonathan Demme is a very sharp editor of his movies.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

The knighthood was a tremendous honour, I don't dismiss it. But I feel embarrassed by the flowery, theatrical stuff that goes with being an actor.

I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I've stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it's not you going through it.

Well, everyone likes movies when they're a little kid.

I never make conscious decisions.

I know that some actors and directors like to have intensity on set. I don't, particularly. Certainly, if they want that, that's fine, but I can't work like that.

What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That's the way I always work.

I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page... sunrise over the desert and masses of... a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

We have a Boesendorfer piano that I play every day. It keeps my brain and my fingers active.

I don't have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don't know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don't know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don't think you need all that stuff.

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

A conductor can't be too arrogant with an orchestra and try to impose himself too much.

I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.

People don't always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don't advance in life.

No expectations. Ask nothing, expect nothing and accept everything, and life is very well.

I know how to be strong. I know how to be ruthless. It's part of my nature. I wouldn't be an actor if I wasn't.

The whole point of courage, to overcome your fear. That's the interesting thing, when courage bleeds through the fear.

I've had no ­contact with my daughter for years. That's her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don't want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.

Guilt is the thief of life.

I always liked to take the plunge, you know, I'd jump in at the deep end and hope that I'd find land somehow, or hope I'd float or survive. That's more or less the way I've gone through my life.

If you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable.

That's what happens if you don't address the darkness in you. You become repressed and depressed and suicidal.

Try not to be concerned with it. It's a spiritual thing. Don't look for the results, don't live in the payoff. Live in the moment which is a spiritual principle. Live in the moment and let the results take care of themselves. It's in the hands of God. The rest is all ego. And I have learned, over the years, it's got nothing to do with me. As my life is none of my business.

We're just blades of grass, and when we go, we go, we never come back; one life . . . maybe that's true. But I tend to believe that this is not all there is. Because my life has been like a shadow of something deeper. And I've experienced that many times.

If you don't go when you want to go, when you do go, you'll find you've gone.

The way to make better decisions is to make more of them. Then make sure you learn from each one, including those that don't seem to work out in the short term: they will provide valuable distinctions to make better evaluations and therefore decisions in the future. Realize that decision making, like any skill you focus on improving, gets better the more often you do it.

Once you accept the fact that there's nothing to fear, you drill into the primal oil well. I believe when we do things without fear, we can do anything. As long as you don't worry about the consequences.

By giving up 'the need' and 'the want', things begin to happen for you

The reward is in the doing of it.

My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.

Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived... The pain now is part of the happiness then.