Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Geoffrey Rush

My eye muscles hurt now when I read our MasterCard bill.

People tend to think of Brisbane as a sleepy, sub-topical place. I don't know. It's like Baltimore or something. I don't know. You would hear the family dramas going on behind closed doors.

I enjoy roles that involve a task outside of my natural capabilities - for example, playing a number of musical instruments or sword fighting or cutting a suit. You have to look as though you can do it, without too much editing.

When people come to me and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face the next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

I knew all about Edward VIII's abdication, George VI becoming the king and having a stammer, but nothing about how he got rid of it.

I live in Australia, and I am Australian, and because I grew up in an era where we didn't have a film industry, and now we do, it's just really exciting for me to be able to say that I work in my own culture in a medium that I find fascinating.

I didn't know the Green Lantern comics at all. I was a Superman reader.

With 'Call Me by Your Name,' they locked off the camera and let scenes play out in long, wide shots to make them feel almost voyeuristic.

I'm in 'Gods of Egypt.' It was CGI on a level that I've never encountered. You're in a blue environment on a mirrored floor because that's going to be looking like Ra the Sun God's boat. In the studio, it was like I was in a Robert Lepage theatrical piece.

What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.

I'm so envious of certain actors that have that natural facility to hear a cadence and the rhythm of an accent, that it goes into their brain and just comes out. Chameleon voices.

I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.

I don't like the ocean. I'm not a natural swimmer, even though I come from Australia. That' a terrible thing to say.

If you're in an Egyptian film and you're not Egyptian, you have to wear mascara and stuff like that.

Within our culture, every school has a swimming pool. We lived on the coast. People swam in the surf. It's a very sporty nation and at that particular time anyone who had an artistic bent was very much an outsider. So if you liked reading or ideas or playing the piano then your dad viewed you as a sissy, basically.

Some people are very good at being themselves and being very natural on screen or being very sexy or handsome or whatever. I like that, and I aspire towards that, but I don't know if I always make it. I work very hard.

As an actor, I'm ambivalent because I'm focused on the other person and what they're giving me, what I need to be giving them, and what the character is thinking.

It's their story, and I got to be the guy in the back while they were in the foreground.

This is what happens when you are on the wrong side of 40. Young adults, who could be your children, are now working with you. I was playing their parents or mentor. I started to think: Oh, I am not part of that group any more.

People are intrigued and fascinated, almost obsessed with the private lives of great public personalities.

I was never a leading man. I've always been in the outer concentric circles in the company, being a character actor, which is a good place to be. It gives you that diversity.

Being in my more senior years now, you hope somewhere along the track that you're going to get to collide with a role that feels very special, and Einstein is such a magnificent figure.

You had to be into sport and, sad to say, I'm a traitor to my country because I don't have a sporting bone in my body.

Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There's a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.

I always felt thrilled and amazed that I could put actor on my tax form.

I always had a fantasy of being a chef, because I like kitchen life.

I die in almost every film I've been in.

I like roles that are on the extreme ends of the spectrum, and there's special appeal in exploring these slightly forgotten plays that people might think of as subjects for academic term papers instead of live theater.

Someone told me that there's a connection to Superman, that in an early edition of the Green Lantern comics, Tomar Re was the envoy to Krypton. That was fascinating to me.

I did not want to put myself on the line, as an Australian playing Britain's greatest comic actor. The fans of Sellers are obsessive, possessive - and aggressive. I did not want to risk their anger - or my own reputation.

I wouldn't mind meeting some of the people I've attempted to portray from the olden, olden days. They probably would all have really terrible skin and horrible bad breath, and I'd have to give them an Altoid.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.

I asked, 'What is this guy?' They said, he's part-fish, part-bird, maybe a bit of lizard, and you don't have to go through five hours of makeup to play him. That was good enough for me.

My kids started school, so having a strong base in Melbourne has been a key priority. I'm not daunted by the travel. People say, 'It's so far to Australia,' and I say, 'You get on the plane, you eat well, you sleep, you wake up - and you're there.'

I was not the young heroic model for 'Hamlet.' I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.

Most films I've worked on have had large casts, but they've been wonderful people. I think the monkey in Pirates of the Caribbean is the most temperamental costar I've had. It would throw tantrums like you wouldn't believe.

Yes, anally retentive men are my forte!

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.'

The hero of the 'Peanuts' is Charlie Brown. I play the dog that sleeps on the top of his dog box who's a philosopher. I'm drawn to that. So I'm drawn to Barbossa as I'm drawn to Einstein, because they are outsiders, and I suppose, as a character actor, that's the turf that you're locked into, in a way.

They were saying, 'Keep this under your hat, but Jack Sparrow's going to die in the second movie.' I went, 'You're kidding me. The fans are going to go berserk.'

Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.

I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine. I do not know why. I was pretty restless, I had been through a bad period of stress induced anxiety - panic attacks - and I was not sure of what I wanted to do.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

I'm a very amateur scientist. For me, it started with the Mercury space program and onward to the moon landing in my impressionable adolescent years.

There's four biggies. There was Elizabeth I, George III, Victoria, and the current queen, who really dominated four eras.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

It's nice going to work and not having to always get on a plane to do it.

I guess I've been fortunate in having an ongoing film career while being based in Melbourne. I'm happy to commute. A day on a plane. Come on. It's easy.

But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

A huge part of what we do as actors is learning to ignore the camera, as if it's not even there, while simultaneously being very aware of the camera and what it's capturing, because you can give the best performance of your life, but if you do it with the back of your head facing the camera, it's going to get cut from the movie.

It was nice to play something that felt a little more muted or internalized in 'The Daughter.'

I went to England in the '70s, and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that, because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

Sometimes you do feel a script that glows in your hand the moment you start reading it. By page four of Shakespeare in Love, I said, 'I have to be in this movie.

I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

I would always slip away to the cinema. I always found something absolutely extraordinary about the fact that these actors were always kind of kicking hard at some new dimension they were doing on film.

For sure, you have to be lost to find a place that can’t be found.

If in the sex scene you happen to be naked in front of a lot of other people you've just got to put that aside, in the same way that you have to put that aside in a fully-clothed intense dialogue scene because you're entering into that particular imaginative state of play.

When people come and tell me I was terrific in this or that, I do not want to fall flat on my face next time. But, tough, I have fallen flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.

Freedom is the kind of essence of being a pirate: You're away from land-locked Europe. You're not part of the society. You're part of the brotherhood of the sea, Your ship is your sense of identity. So when you approach the wheel, that's what you own.

More people have a fear of speaking than a fear of death. So at a funeral, most people would want to be the person in the coffin rather than the person delivering the eulogy!