William Hurt Quotes (39 Quotes)


    But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

    If you're lucky, and not a lot of actors are these days, you get the chance to create a character.

    The thing is David is also aware of everything and it's not like you're going somewhere the director is not.

    I need to exist as an actor. . . . There is frustration. But that's not my primary experience. The primary experience is, Today I'm gonna go try. When I get it, it feels wonderful. But even trying feels good.

    David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.


    I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily.

    Being stared at is not fun . . . There are times when someone on the street says, Are you William Hurt and I will say, No, not at the moment.

    Heroes to me are guys that sit in libraries. They absorb knowledge and then the risks they take are calculated on the basis of the courage it took to become replete with knowledge.

    You have to create a track record of breaking your own mold, or at least other people's idea of that mold.

    I know what I love about acting - and it's the creative process.

    I listen to XM radio because I can get so many overseas news stations.

    I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.

    People who have expertise or the luck to have rehearsal time with cameras have it over people who don't.

    I just looked at him because I want to be looking in someone's eyes when I die.

    David had this thing in his chest and couldn't shake it,

    What if you went to the nth degree to prove to yourself that you're the person you want to be But you found that it's completely different from the person that you are, and you found yourself in a place that consistently refuted the facts as you sensed them

    It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.

    It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.

    I've been delighted by Cannes and Toronto but I keep saying I don't know how good we're going to be received in America because that's where it's most challenging.

    I need six weeks of rehearsal and women need nine months and it took me 15 years to figure that out.

    I very much prefer the balance in a scene to standing out and so you have to make a decision.

    Being a father, being a friend, those are the things that make me feel successful.

    The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

    All I know is that my best work has come out of being committed and happy.

    Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study.

    The perfection in theater is that it's over the second it's done.

    I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people.

    I have a film I want to direct. Gena Rowlands was going to do it with me a long time ago. It's about an older woman who's running a ranch in the west the old fashioned way.

    I'm working on a De Niro film right now called The Good Shepherd and I'm also working on a film directed by Chad Lowe called Beautiful Ohio.

    I was held hostage and almost executed by a man who was robbing us in the middle of the night.

    You don't look at it as the size of the role. Quantity is not the point. You can be as thorough in 30 seconds as you can in three hours.

    Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you're just trying to get in and you're given so little time to get in gently, but it's always hard.

    He'll even let himself be characterized as perverse. He's not. He's the opposite of perverse. He's coaxing our perversions, our suppressed perversions, into the open and helping us to deal with them in this wonderful way.

    I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either.

    I am so thrilled by the privilege of life, and yet at the same time I know that I have to let it go.

    Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure.

    What's really frustrating with movies is the lack of improvement.

    Being famous is not something that would make me feel successful - unless one was striving for mediocrity.

    The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.


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