I never make conscious decisions.
You’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?
You still wake up sometimes. You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
The reward is in the doing of it.
If you don’t go when you want to go, when you do go, you’ll find you’ve gone.
My life is not my own business.
Relish everything that’s inside of you, the imperfections, the darkness, the richness and light and everything. And that makes for a full life.
The knighthood was a tremendous honour, I don’t dismiss it. But I feel embarrassed by the flowery, theatrical stuff that goes with being an actor.
I have no illusions about my position in this world as an actor or anything like that. I’m very realistic. Reality is a very liberating thing.
Shakespeare’s so bloody difficult, and I don’t like failure. You can fail on film, but there’s nobody actually there in the flesh to watch you failing.
I’m more and more convinced that life is a dream. What has happened to me is surely a dream.
It created in me a yearning for all that is wide and open and expansive. Something that will never allow me to fit in in my own country, with its narrow towns and narrow roads and narrow kindnesses and narrow reprimands.
When you’re younger you’ve got a lot of ideas and you’re probably more insecure. I work with young actors now and I see their insecurities, and I make them laugh because I know exactly what they’re going through. When you get older you think, it’s only a movie after all, it’s not brain surgery.
Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.
And I love a scary movie. It makes your toes curl and it’s not you going through it.
Acting’s entertainment. It’s not brain surgery.
Hitchcock was such a master of putting on screen things that made you uneasy. Somebody once asked him what frightened him most, and he said the police. He came from a poor background. I think he understood those fears.
I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I’m not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.
Living with reality is a very good trick. It gives you tremendous freedom and it changes the structure of molecules of your soul by living through reality because you don’t expect anything anymore, which is a weird paradox.
Acting is about listening and reacting. John Wayne was right: Acting is just reacting. You don’t have to do much – as long as you stay out of the way of others. That’s why it works.