Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity.
If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life can offer.
There's a line in the picture where he snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.
People around me never say anything. They just seem to want to hear what I have to say. That's why I do all the talking.
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
Tell me, do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.
I believe I did what honor dictated and that belief sustains me, except for a slight desire to be dead which I'm sure will pass.
The most repulsive thing you could ever imagine is the inside of a camel's mouth. That and watching a girl eat octopus or squid.
There isn't anything that pays you as much money as acting while you are deciding what the hell you're going to do with yourself.
The four pillars of wisdom that support journalistic endeavors are: lies, stupidity, money-grubbing, and ethical irresponsibility.
If the expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash.
I value each woman for what she has to offer whether it be charm-beauty-wit-intelligence or humor but warmth is the quality I value most.
We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?
I don't know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I'm going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.
Acting serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life.
Our family always had animals, but they became more important to me as the years passed because they helped me deal with the absence of love.
If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you're unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.
(...the non-conformist, how do you keep from getting scarred?)/i don’t! i got a scar here…and uh i got a scar on my knee…and uh a few scars on my soul.
Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski. They can't help it, but, it is troubling.
At Libertyville High, I was a bad student, chronic truant, and all-round incorrigible. I was forever being sent to the principal's office to be disciplined.
I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving.
With women, I've got a long bamboo pole with a leather loop on the end. I slip the loop around their necks so they can't get away or come too close. Like catching snakes.
The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs, never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel to much.
Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.
You've seen every single race besmirched, but you never saw an unfavorable image of a kike because the Jews are ever watchful for that. They never allowed it to be shown on the screen!
George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.
The caste system may be more highly developed in countries like India or England, but every tier of society in almost every culture tries to dominate a group it perceives as beneath it.
Most of my childhood memories of my father are of being ignored. I was his namesake, but nothing I did ever pleased or even interested him. He enjoyed telling me I couldn't do anything right.
The power and influence of a movie star is curious: I didn't ask for it or take it; people gave it to me. Simply because you're a movie star, people empower you with special rights and privileges.
Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences and I am not ashamed. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.
I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armor because I’m too sensitive. If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ve got to get out.
I suppose the story of my life is a search for love, but more than that, I have been looking for a way to repair myself from the damages I suffered early on and to define my obligation, if I had any, to myself and my species.
I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.
I have never been able to remember the number of my driver's license, and there have been times when I couldn't even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.
At fourteen or fifteen, I decided to earn my living when I grew up playing drums made from wooden beer kegs and leading a group called Keg Brando and His Kegliners. We organized a little band, but it didn't last long and didn't make any money.
The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.
I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.
Ask most kids about details about Auschwitz or about how the American Indians were assassinated as a people and they don't know anything about it. They don't want to know anything. Most people just want their beer or their soap opera or their lullaby.
The close-up says everything, it's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.
I have decided to tell the story of my life as best I can, so that my children can separate the truth from the myths that others have created about me, as myths are created about everyone swept up in the turbulent and distorting maelstrom of celebrity in our culture.
We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it's vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives.
Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age.
I don't think that people generally realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian, as a matter of fact, all ethnic groups. All minorities. All non-whites. People just simply don't realize. They take it for granted that that's the way people are going to be presented and that these cliches are just going to be perpetuated.
A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs.Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much.
I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King.
Do you remember when Marilyn Monroe died? Everybody stopped work, and you could see all that day the same expressions on their faces, the same thought: ‘How can a girl with success, fame, youth, money, beauty . . . how could she kill herself?’ Nobody could understand it because those are the things that everybody wants, and they can’t believe that life wasn’t important to Marilyn Monroe, or that her life was elsewhere
When I lie on the beach there naked, which I do sometimes, and I feel the wind coming over me and I see the stars up above and I am looking into this very deep, indescribable night, it is something that escapes my vocabulary to describe. Then I think: 'God, I have no importance. Whatever I do or don't do, or what anybody does, is not more important than the grains of sand that I am lying on, or the coconut that I am using for my pillow.' So I really don't think in the long sense.
People will like you who never met you, they think you're absolutely wonderful; and then people also will hate you, for reasons that have nothing to do with any real experience with you. People don't want to lose their enemies. We have favorite enemies, people we love to hate and we hate to love. If they do something good, we don't like it. I found myself doing that with Ronald Reagan. He is anathema to me. If he does something that's reasonable, I find my mind trying to find some way to interpret it so that it's not reasonable, so that somewhere it's jingoist extremism.