Quote collection
74 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character."
"I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it."
"I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it."
"I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy."
"I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That's what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn't funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free."
"My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor."
"Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?"
"I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that."
"Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?"
"So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it."
"I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this."
"Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love."
"I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism."
"Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political."
"Lots of things are hard work, but I think writing, for me, after I started acting at 13 years old. I like writing now much more than I do acting only because well, partly because the scripts that are offered are junk."
"I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her's. I didn't think I had the right."
"But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me."
"I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous."
"A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do."
"I'm in complete remission. I'm alive and well."