"The actor becomes an emotional athlete."
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Al Pacino quotes (page 4 of 10)
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"The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back."
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"Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted."
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"I don't talk politics and I don't talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person."
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"The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth."
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"Sometimes the only way you can get an audience is at an audition."
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"I don't like what's going on in Iraq, naturally. I'm part of a large majority of people who don't, but I do not know the whole story. I do not believe what I see on television. I believe a percentage of it, so it's hard for me to discern. I don't like what it's doing to the world."
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"I'm not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I've always displayed. I guess it has to do with my tradition and being Italian, we're very outgoing with our emotions."
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"I hope the perception is that I'm an actor, I never intended to be a movie star."
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"The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful - my personal life suffers."
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"The thing is doing it, that's what it's all about. Not in the results of it. After all what is a risk? It's a risk not to take risks. Otherwise, you can go stale and repeat yourself. I don't feel like a person who takes risks. Yet there's something within me that must provoke controversy because I find it wherever I go. Anybody who cares about what he does takes risks."
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"I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It's almost like a painter having a model to become."
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"I don't like a lot of things like [Iraq], I never did. Being in a position of celebrity and having your words carry such unnatural weight...I've always been a bit squeamish when it came to that kind of thing."
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"When [Julia Marie Pacino] was 5 or 6 years old, we were in an Italian restaurant, and these people came by the table and they would start talking to me, asking me for my autograph and she just went under the table."
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"Vanity is my favourite sin."
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"A lot of acting is private time."
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"Either I act or I die."
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"I would say I am more concerned with the plays I'm going to do than the movies. I'm more comfortable in a play. In film, there's always a certain sense of control, of holding back. The stage is different ; there's more to act. There are more demands put on you, more experiences to go through."
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"It would be hard to play a character you don't like - for me anyway - or can't find something in them to like."
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"We were doing Scarface many years ago...and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean. I thought, what's going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director, Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does."
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