Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.
To me all palaces are preposterous, a tasteless, dreary expression of ostentation.
I walk in the Rain, so people won’t see my tears.
In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard.
An den Scheidewegen des Lebens stehen keine Wegweiser.
You have the love of humanity in your hearts. In the seventeenth chapter of saint Luke it is written the kingdom of god is in men. Not in one man nor a group of men but in all men. In you.
They will always criticize you, speak badly of you, it’ll be hard to meet someone who will like you as you are, so live, do what your hear tells you to do... Life is like a play that does not allow testing. So sing, cry, dance, laugh and live intensely every day of your life, before the curtain closes and the piece ends with no applause.
More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.
My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.
I remember when one dressed the part for the West End, and strolled with yellow gloves and a walking-stick. But that world has gone, and another takes its place, eyes see differently, emotions react to other themes. Men weep at jazz, and violence has become sexual. Time marches on.
When I realize how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my scepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
Acquaintances were willing to enter into the warmest of friendships and share my problems as though they were relatives. It was all very flattering, but my nature does not respond to such intimacy. I like friends as I like music – when I am in the mood. Such freedom, however, was at the price of occasional loneliness.
We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity.
At that time Wells was enthusiastic about what Roosevelt had accomplished with the New Deal, and was of the opinion that a quasi-socialism in America would come out of a dying capitalism. He seemed especially critical of Stalin, whom he had interviewed, and said that under his rule Russia had become a tyrannical dictatorship.
To me theatricalism means dramatic embellishment: the art of the aposiopesis; the abrupt closing of a book; the lighting of a cigarette; the effects off-stage, a pistol shot, a cry, a fall, a crash; an effective entrance, an effective exit – all of which may seem cheap and obvious, but if treated sensitively and with discretion, they are the poetry of the theatre.
You have to believe in yourself, that’s the secret. Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it, you go down to defeat.
Nothing is forever in this world, not even our problems.
I was a worshipper of the foolhardy and the melodramatic, a dreamer and a moper, raging at life and loving it, a mind in a chrysalis yet erupting with sudden bursts of maturity.
One cannot always approach truth through reason; it confines us to a geometric cast of thought that calls for logic and credibility. We see the dead in our dreams and accept them as living, knowing at the same time they are dead. And although this dream mind is without reason, has it not its own credibility?
Fight to live life, to suffer it and to enjoy it. Life is wonderful if you are not afraid of it.
Life was menial and lacked enchantment.