Top 221 Quotes & Sayings by John Hurt
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British actor John Hurt.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
My father's a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.
Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.
The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that's worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just doodling. It's much easier when you're just told what you have to do.
I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.
I was completely crazy and mad when I was young. I was absolutely in love with the dissolute.
Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.
If I'm doing a play, 30 to 40 percent of the people that come to the stage door have pictures of 'Alien' for me to autograph. And usually, the photos are pretty gory ones.
I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.
I'm not interested in awards. I never have been. I don't think they are important. Don't get me wrong, if somebody gives me a prize, I thank them as gratefully as I know how, because it's very nice to be given a prize. But I don't think that awards ought to be sought.
I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.
There's an awful lot of hanging around when you're doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.
My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.
I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.
I've done a couple of conferences where you sit and sign autographs for people, and then you have photographs taken with them and a lot of them all dressed up in alien suits or 'Doctor Who' whatevers. I was terrified of doing it because I thought they'd all be loonies, but they are absolutely, totally charming as anything. It's great fun.
I'm very much of the opinion that to work is better than not to work.
The clergy is in the same business as actors, just a different department.
It's an immensely competitive business, and I can tell you the older you get, the parts are fewer, and the people who are proven performers are greater.
I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.
I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.
I can't say that I wouldn't prefer to make small films, basically because I think they are probably more interesting in terms of the material. But every now and again, it's quite good to do a big one.
I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.
I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn't really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio.
I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.
We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.
Things come in a quieter way to me. It's not laziness, and it's not diffidence. I just know how far you have to bend for work. That's important for me.
Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.
To me, nothing ever feels like a sure thing. I cling to that because it's very important you don't ever think anything is a sure thing.
It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.
'The Naked Civil Servant' was as important for me as 'Easy Rider' was for Jack Nicholson. No question.
Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone.
As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.
Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.
I think fame makes people a bit nervous.
Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it's going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.
If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.
Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.
Ultimately, the film industry has always pushed out its biggies, and I don't have a problem with that. I just wish that we'd spend more time nurturing the smaller ones.
Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.
The things that I've enjoyed most are not really science fiction. They are not much fun to make because there are so many toys involved. They are fun for directors who like toys, like Ridley Scott, but they are not a lot of fun to make. A lot of hanging around, changing this and that.
I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don't necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.
I knew I wanted to act from a very young age - from about nine, really - but I didn't know how to go about it. I had no idea. The world was a much bigger place then.
The first thing you have to get used to in any kind of acting is the ability to make a fool of yourself. If you haven't learnt how to make a fool of yourself, you shouldn't be on the boards. That's absolutely what it's all about.
Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realise that it is going to come to an end at some stage.
I'm fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it's so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.
Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.
Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don't think he painted a masterpiece.
Really, I'm only alive out of curiosity. I'm very curious about where we're all marching.
I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you've lost your deposit. It's best if you don't say it.
It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.
I've done some stinkers in the cinema. You can't regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it's just the location.
I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.
My criteria when looking for a role is that I will do anything that stands the chance of succeeding on the level it is intended to. After that, if it's a part I can do something personal with.
Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There's no point in saying you've got the establishment wrong because they hadn't got the establishment wrong, they'd got it absolutely dead on.
I say you play a part, you don't work one.
I've never guided my life. I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in. I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?
We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.
I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer.
I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.
Everybody's got to work with Roger Corman. You can't leave out that experience.
I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question.
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