John Hurt Quotes

I've got plenty of train memories. I was sent to school when I was eight years old in 1948 in Kent. So I had to go through London in 1948, just after the war. Many ,many strange experiences.

There may be arrangements to have me retired but I don't know. Things happen that I enjoy doing, and as long as I enjoy doing them I'll go about doing them, I guess.

I love working with Lars [von Trier]! I've worked with him three times. I did the narration of Dogville and Manderlay.

I stopped asking a long time ago, "why would you want me to play that?" I'm an actor. That's what I do.

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

With [Fred] Zinnemann I did A Man For All Seasons. He was my screen godfather. I'm happy to say he was.

From John Huston to Fred Zinnemann and Richard Fleischer and all those great American directors.

We're all far too afraid of being so arrogant to say "Either you can or you can't."

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.

In the States it's more and more difficult to get an independent film off the ground, and you certainly wont get the opportunity to play something like that in a studio movie.

I'm very director oriented.

Lotte Lenya was all emotion. She wasn't anything but emotion. She was not an intellectual.

It's amazing how quickly human beings adapt, isn't it? It was such a great crew, and David [Lynch] was wonderful to work with [on 'The Elephant Man']. It was a very thrilling time, actually.

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 wanted to work with those boys (producers Andy and Larry Wachowski) because they're so eccentric and peculiar. Larry, of course, is halfway towards being a woman now. It's a crazy world.

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

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.

I'd say the film to avoid is a director's second film, particularly if his first film was a big success. The second film is where you've really needed to have learned something.

The truth is rarely true and never simple.

Once you've started to dig a hole, you can't get out of it.

My fathers a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

There are certain people that when they ask you to do a film, you just say, "Where and when?"

People are not what they seem to be according to their looks.

The British tradition, basically, is to go to the character. And the Hollywood tradition, shall we say, is basically to take the character to the performer.

I certainly don't see myself as Caligula.

I find it difficult to say, like "which child do you prefer the most", and its a sort of surface choice. I've never known how to quite answer that one adequately.

We all have our limitations.

On the other hand, you get other films that are spread over a much longer period of time and it's entirely exhausting. But there's always light at the end of the tunnel with a film.

I felt, you know, body and soul, as it were. But, of course, I mean, I - at that age, I didn't think in terms of being professional. I didn't know anything about it. That happened later.

If I hadn't been a part of [Harry Potter] I would have been deeply upset.

This whole theory of alienation that intellectuals have been passing on, really is just to stop a lot of ham acting. If you fill something with a proper emotion, it didn't worry him at all.

The image onscreen takes you forward, it's the driving force of the piece and it's also the information that you're given.

I thought ['Sailcloth'] was a terrific script. Elfar Adalsteins, the director, is bound to be a director we'll hear from, and the whole thing was really enjoyable.

I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.

One wonders sometimes, looking at the world, how it's dealing with itself. There are days when you wake up and you feel very optimistic and there are days when you feel pessimistic.

I've never felt that anger is a very powerful emotion.

The difference between anger and deep remorse - remorse is much fatter. It's a deeper feeling altogether. Anger is too easy an escape for my money.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It's kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast.