Top 255 Quotes & Sayings by Anthony Hopkins - Page 4

I'm just an actor. It's the way the script is written, and it's easy. I don't have think about it. When you receive the script, you know pretty well how to play it, apart from little technicalities like the accent.

Acting is constricted because you have the lines. But I improvise with it and what I learn on the set. I improvise rhythms and just changes.

On his Hannibal Lector mask: I've got it at home. I wear it to bed every night.

I don't have any expectations about my films. If they're good, they're good - if they're not, they're not. About 10 years ago, I remember going to see one of my movies - I can't even remember which one now - and everyone was jumping up and down, getting excited, saying what a great film it was going to be. We all went in and watched it, and it was the slowest movie I've ever seen. The next day, the reviews were terrible and half the studio was fired.

I was born in the same town as Richard Burton, the actor, and I saw him, he used to come - he and his wife drove by in the car in my father's shop and Burton would come home from Hollywood and ask him for his autograph, and I thought, I want to be like him. And that's all I said to myself, I want to be like that. I want to get out of this environment of my own empty mind.

I love the hour in makeup. It gives you time to think and have a cup of coffee. It's my favorite part of the day.

I love traveling. I like to keep moving. I love the big open spaces in America.

There are people who are convinced supernatural forces are at work, but I've no idea. I suspect 'possession' might be a psychological thing, like schizophrenia. We all think we know things, but we don't know a damn thing. Whether God exists, why we're here... Nobody really knows any of it.

Getting old ain't for the faint of heart.

I always distrust the word art when it is applied to acting.

How do you play Hannibal Lector? Well just don't move. Scare people by being still.

I've been very lucky. I've had my problems in the past, I've had my troubles, but you move on. I had a great life and I am really thankful for it.

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.

Things have changed so much now. Everything is downloaded onto computers. I'm not a computer-savvy guy, but with downloading the movie industry has changed.

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.

I enjoy painting. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I paint. I paint very quickly.

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting.

My life is not my own business.

There's a thing that if you - somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it's a kind of paradox.

Acting is about listening and reacting. John Wayne was right: Acting is just reacting. You don't have to do much - as long as you stay out of the way of others. That's why it works.

I’m not being cynical, but when you’re doing a movie you have a number of choices as an actor. Then you see it all cut together and all of those precious little pieces you put in are maybe on the cutting room floor. So, you don’t have that much control. You have very little control, in fact.

There's no truth in acting, it's all a trick, because you go on stage in front of sets, you're on film - it's all a trick. I'm making it sound very - I really am demystifying it, but what I try to do, what I do, and I hope effectively, is to create a reality as if it is happening now, that you're fishing for words out of the air.

I love to have a laugh. I like to tease people.

There's many a good tune played by an old banjo.

Hitchcock was such a master of putting on screen things that made you uneasy. Somebody once asked him what frightened him most, and he said the police. He came from a poor background. I think he understood those fears.

Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn't it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.

When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.

Ryan Gosling. He was a good kid, good actor. I like him very much. What was the name of the movie? I've forgotten it. Fracture.

I could stay making nice safe BBC movies for the rest of my life, so I decided to risk it. It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

When you're younger you have a lot of ideas and you're probably more insecure, all those things. I work with young actors now and I see their insecurities and I make fun of them. I don't make fun of them but I make them laugh, because I know what they're going through. When you get older you think 'It's only a movie after all, it's not brain surgery.'

I've played a lot of parts. But I don't look at my feeling is that this is a job. It's given me a good living.

At my age, any day above ground and vertical is a good day.

I'm composing and writing music.

I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I'm not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.

Shakespeare's so bloody difficult, and I don't like failure. You can fail on film, but there's nobody actually there in the flesh to watch you failing.

There is nothing to be scared of in movies. It's a bit scarier going on stage.

Working with Katherine Hepburn, she said to me, "Don't act." She said, "Read the lines. Just be. Just speak the lines." I said, "Okay." She said, "You look good. You got a good pair of shoulders, you got a good head, good face."

I'm having a great life. And I'm 73 and they still phone me up and ask me to do a job here and there.

You still wake up sometimes. You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.

It created in me a yearning for all that is wide and open and expansive. Something that will never allow me to fit in in my own country, with its narrow towns and narrow roads and narrow kindnesses and narrow reprimands.

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

People ask me how did you choose the part and how did you prepare for this work? I just learned the lines and showed up; I don't know what else to say because that's all I know how to do.

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.

I found a way into the acting business because I thought, well, it beats working for a living, and so that's what I do. But I still feel like a bit of a stranger in it all. I've never really belonged anywhere.

What is so liberating about this whole business is when you see that, you know, big movies are going to come out, huge movies are going to come out, and then you see them up in Malibu in the little Triplex theater a week later, on the scratch negative, and you think...“This is show business. This is the great movie career. And it’s all finding it in the shoebox.”

I'm not unfamiliar with music, and I really do write music. I've gotten a talent for it. I don't have the technical skills, but I do plan to learn.

I don't mind being a commodity. It's given me a good life.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

I have no illusions about my position in this world as an actor or anything like that. I'm very realistic. Reality is a very liberating thing.

I don't have any [favourite role]. I'm just a working actor.

When I was a younger actor, I was very immersed in it, very "method" and all that. Now, I don't give a hoot.

I wanted to be a musician but I didn't have the talent for it, so I decided I wanted to be famous, so I became an actor.

You have to be pretty tough to be an actor, and you have to be pretty certain what you want. You can't waffle through this business.

I look in the mirror and I see the lines, but I don't care. It's a good time. I don't know why it's such a good time, but it's a good time.

I became an actor because I didn't know what else to do. Academically, I wasn't good.

I said once that if they gave me enough money to read the phone book, I'd do it. I live in a total state of non-expectation. I don't expect things, and I keep my expectations very low about everything.

When people call me Sir Anthony I just think oh, that's a bit odd. But I'm not cynical about it. Um, I just feel more comfortable being called Tony or Mr. Hopkins, whatever name I'm called.

If you're in a successful play and the play is working well - I mean successful because the audiences like it, the audiences respond well - it's a pleasure.

Some nights you might go through an entire performance and not feel a thing, and the audience may have a much better time, 'cause if you're enjoying yourself on stage too much, they're having a terrible time because they can't hear you. And if you're a woman your mascara's running.

I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway.