"I destroy the painting as soon as I can see what it is. When I can make out something in it, I destroy it because it's no longer coming from my unconscious."
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Al Pacino quotes (page 8 of 10)
196 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Being the actors of the craft, the trade, one of the big things you do and you learn is about repeating. There is something to the repeats. I think that is part of what is healthy to young actors. Get out and learn something just through doing that, repeating."
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"When I was younger, there was the sex thing. That's par for the course.When you're a movie star, it went with it. It's a kind of rite of passage, socially."
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"The physical stamina [in Revolution]. I was just shocked by it. I didn't think I had it in me ever, and I wasn't terribly young when I did it. I was in my early forties. That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality."
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"I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot."
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"It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me."
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"I used to think of myself as a comedian. I've always admired comedians. Their minds, the way in which they se the world is so striking, the way they juxtapose things, the way they can see humor in people. There's a liberation in that."
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"I was never very happy with performing; it didn't turn me on much."
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"It's not personal, it's strictly business"
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"I didn't want the book [of memoirs] out, naturally - Larry [Grobel] knew that for 20 years, 15 at least, I didn't want anything written about me. Then, you know, things happen, finally it's OK and I trust Larry. Nothing about it is salacious in any way."
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"My movies are always being played on television, I'm very well known and all that stuff - I go all over the world, I have access to many things, many people, many places and it's wonderful. But now I'm at a point where...I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time."
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"Drinking and smoking grass were a part of my life as far back as I can remember."
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"If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it's just great fodder for you. It's wonderful source stuff that we die for."
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"I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it."
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"There has been a lot of self-doubt and unwelcome events in my life."
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"Pretty soon I'll start worrying about [my fame] because [my children] carry my name and they have that exposure. The whole thing is, they never asked for it, that kingdom."
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"Certainly the movies were always in the air for me. I come from the era when actors thought it was a big deal to be in the movies."
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"[Oscar Wilde's Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that's why I guess it's semi-autobiographical."
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"You don't get to know anybody in a movie until after it's over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage."
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"Women have always had equal importance onstage, and working with them must have altered my sensibilities. I've never felt sensitive to the whole issue, because being macho has never been a problem with me."
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