John Hurt Quotations | Page 2

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the filmmakers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.

I think, you have to forget about intellect, to a degree. Intuition is very important when you're working with a lens, I believe, for what the lens is doing, too.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone. You don't feel that you're being tested, as it were.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it's bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn't, then there's something drastically wrong.

Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.

Very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

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.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

You collect as much information as you can and then you put it into the mulberry of your mind and hope that you come up with a decent wine. Sometimes you do; sometimes you don't.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!