John Hurt Quotes (48 Quotes)

What's the difference, actually, between believing in a God on one side or the other, Catholic or Protestant It's all the same if you accept it. Much of our morality is based on things completely outmoded. But people are wonderful. There's no harm in them, they're not the problem. It's governments and politics that make wars and do stupid things, and they should be attended to. There's no security in this life.

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.

Water will begin to slide down those hills toward the flat intersection and hold it until it has an opportunity to drain.

I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the filmmakers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.

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.

sent it on its way.

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.

You can see the overhead structures that have been built up to the interstate. We've gotten about as far as we can go and now we have to work over the interstate.

The spray from the other vehicles, but you've also got precipitation so you've got it coming up at you from the roadway surface as well as probably falling and it can be a very disorienting sensation.

maybe what we today would call a nerd or a geek.

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.

My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel... .

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

You've got to shout to make yourself heard in this business. It's unfortunate, but true-if you don't spell everything out in your contract, you've got only yourself to blame for the treatment you get. Otherwise, whether it's having a caravan-a dressing-room trailer-on the set each day, or whatever it is, you don't get it.

Obviously, the arrogance of my own nature in regards to other people's work would suggest that I think I'm talented.

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.

It's going to put the cat among the pigeons, and that's not a bad thing, it seems to me.

His life has really opened up since I made him a Senator

He was a very experienced man, and for some inexplicable reason, he walked out in front of one of those rollers. We're stunned.

This used to be just FM 1325, a little old farm road. And now State Highway 45, which is the new toll road, will run through here and actually follow the old 1325 alignment, continue across what was Louis Henna and eventually connect with State Highway 130, another toll road.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

The drink was effecting me badly. I was feeling lousy especially in the morning. Now I have a much fuller time with people. The more you don't drink the more you find you can be high as a kite anyway. I had huge fun when I was drinking. But towards the end I was not genuinely enjoying it. I drank mainly for enthusiasm, to prolong the night and the laughter and the conversation.

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 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.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

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 never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

I think it would be really sad if the local people didn't realize how important he was.

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.

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.

We're not approaching it to make a carbon copy of what we did last time but we've tended to come back to the way we were thinking then. More to the point, I'm creeping up toward being old enough for it now.

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.

As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid 75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.

I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.

I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

As far as movies go, my master is Fred Zinnemann.

When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.

I think the director, John Huston, took on the picture because he's been trying to outdo his father, Walter Huston, and that's impossible. How do you cope with a genius I couldn't communicate with my own father.

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.

Being a painter is a lonely, desolate life, but I learned by observing people, observing conditions around me, the way things worked. And I've found that painting-which I still do-has helped me a great deal as an actor. There's a surprising amount in common.

I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

It rained so hard and so quickly that the drainage system wasn't able to get rid of it as it normally does.

They got the apartment, they got the free place to live. They got priority over the Houston unemployed right now.

Shooting Dogs. Its a wake-up call.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.