Ben Kingsley Quotes (87 Quotes)


    I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.

    One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

    Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.

    I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

    I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.


    I might be asked to make an emotional expression which is me being absolutely, absolutely still and making maybe one movement, and there it is.

    I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

    If we hit the collective nerve of the audience on that night, that they would be standing up and rushing towards the stage to hug us.

    I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.

    All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

    There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There's never been a trough of my assurance.

    I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

    John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.


    I think one of my main moments of inspiration was when I was about 5.

    I was very lazy in the sixth form at school, I wasn't motivated properly, I handled it very badly and I was not given a place at university to study medicine.

    As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

    Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

    The title is the equivalent of when you become a doctor after years of medical school training... I suppose after years of chewing up the furniture and scenery on stage and in films I get to Sir for being a thespian.

    When I choose a role it's either because I recognise the man, or that I'm very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don't play him.

    I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.

    I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

    If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

    If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.

    I try not to make it easy for myself. I try very hard to stay in the moment. I'm not an actor who psyches himself up for a take. I do the opposite. I actually try and reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce and get to what I call a flat line or a zero.

    The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

    I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.

    Once I start painting, once I start acting and working, it's not a holiday. It's not a respite, but it is, in a sense, a balance, but it's of equal weight. It's a balance it does balance out.

    It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.

    I enjoy this status so much, feeling that I'm close to the heart of the tribe as an actor, a storyteller, a troubadour, but socially quite distant because I don't fit into any particular comfortable slot.

    I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities.

    There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.

    I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate.

    I've met holocaust survivor victims, through other films, and I know what survivor guilt is like.

    I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

    The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

    I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

    In cinema, the leading player is the director.

    That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

    Ever since I did Sexy Beast in 1999 my career has been very busy and very rewarding. It's a wonderful time for me,

    I am-hello-an actor, an entertainer, a song-and-dance man. can do anything.

    But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible.

    Maybe it's not a very businesslike approach, but it's always what attracts me... I do believe that it is that energy, that wonderful energy of the ancient craft of storytelling that will ignite something in the listeners.

    Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it it just happens. It's a very important question no acting.

    Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

    I have no misconceptions about my dentist because when I go to my dentist I see what he does... Nobody can really understand the process of acting because... we don't want them to.

    But filming is good for you, because the crew isn't allowed to laugh. You can't get addicted to getting the laugh.

    When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.

    There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.

    There's always a part of me that's migrating. That's so much part of my attempt to portray all these different men. The sense of being displaced from my home, homeland and language is a very real part of my working life.


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