Anthony Hopkins
When you're younger you have so many ideas about yourself; everything is important. It's not when you look back, nothing is that important. It's only life.Collection: Ideas
I know how to be strong. I know how to be ruthless. It's part of my nature. I wouldn't be an actor if I wasn't.Collection: Strong
I became an actor because I didn't know what else to do. Academically, I wasn't good.Collection: Actors
I don't mind being a commodity. It's given me a good life.Collection: Good Life
I'm not unfamiliar with music, and I really do write music. I've gotten a talent for it. I don't have the technical skills, but I do plan to learn.Collection: Writing
When people call me Sir Anthony I just think oh, that's a bit odd. But I'm not cynical about it. Um, I just feel more comfortable being called Tony or Mr. Hopkins, whatever name I'm called.Collection: Thinking
I wanted to be a musician but I didn't have the talent for it, so I decided I wanted to be famous, so I became an actor.Collection: Musician
What is so liberating about this whole business is when you see that, you know, big movies are going to come out, huge movies are going to come out, and then you see them up in Malibu in the little Triplex theater a week later, on the scratch negative, and you think...“This is show business. This is the great movie career. And it’s all finding it in the shoebox.”Collection: Thinking
You have to be pretty tough to be an actor, and you have to be pretty certain what you want. You can't waffle through this business.Collection: Actors
I've always liked American actors particularly. Because that was my first impression. I was very enamoured of America when I was a kid because we were surrounded by American soldiers during the war, the accent was very strange to me, it was very exotic and very captivating.Collection: War
I do the best I can - I know my way around [Russian method acting pioneer] Stanislavski, but I can't take myself seriously like that. I respect people who do it, of course. I just think I'm lucky to still be working at 73. You reach a point in life where you just think, "Show up, do your job, make sure the cheque's on the way," and that's it. I'm not hungry to do anything more, really.Collection: Jobs
I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.Collection: Writing
If you're in a successful play and the play is working well - I mean successful because the audiences like it, the audiences respond well - it's a pleasure.Collection: Mean
I don't have any [favourite role]. I'm just a working actor.Collection: Roles
I like to work. I don't like to disrupt my equilibrium. I don't like to change my head. I'd rather be a third-rate actor. It's a job, and I'm dedicated in my way. I enjoy it. I'm serious about it. But if it doesn't come off, I'm not going to die.Collection: Jobs
Some nights you might go through an entire performance and not feel a thing, and the audience may have a much better time, 'cause if you're enjoying yourself on stage too much, they're having a terrible time because they can't hear you. And if you're a woman your mascara's running.Collection: Running
I've always liked to be a meat and potatoes kind of actor who doesn't believe in any of the highfalutin stuff about acting, so I tend to be a little bit more cynical.Collection: Believe
You relax within the verse. You realize the structure of the verse and relax into it. It's like swimming. Or riding a bike. You can't make it sound real if you are thinking it through as you go. You can't think through Shakespeare, you have to speak it. And listen to the rhythm of it and then it takes you over. And to make it sound real you speak as if you believe it. Don't act it. Just be it.Collection: Real
I still don't know what the film was about because all I remember is a whole lot of technical dialogue about a body in a suitcase.Collection: Body
My weak spot is laziness. I have a lot of weak spots - cookies, croissants; my wife is always lecturing me about this, I tend to put it all down as habit or it's just acting.Collection: Wife
I do my job, and I do what I’m paid to do and I’m always prepared. I prepare by learning the text so well that when I show up, I’m relaxed and the performance sort of happens. Now whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know... Whatever I say is going to sound very egocentric and self centered anyway so I’d better shut up.Collection: Jobs
I used to be a bit obsessed by acting but not anymore. I do enjoy acting but I probably enjoy it more now because it's easier. I can't work in the theater because to me it's too serious. It's like being in prison for me. I admire people that can do that but I can't do it. I'd rather live my life and do a bit of acting in between.Collection: People
I am young! Being creative and keeping your brain occupied is very sensible because if you don't you die, slowly.Collection: Creative
I've always been hopeless at everything when I was a kid. That's why I became an actor - 'cause I couldn't do anything else.Collection: Kids
My life has been a kind of mystery to me. By all my logical, linear thinking I started out in school as a little boy, I didn't have a clue about anything. What they were talking about in school, couldn't play sports, couldn't learn, and I was bottom of the class.Collection: Sports
Whether it's overeating or it's overworking or over-sex or whatever it is, alcoholism, drug addition, we push ourselves to the brink and then pull back because it's kind of exciting.Collection: Sex
I've reached a happy stage in my life - you can call it "happy" - but I have no expectations anymore. I'm glad I'm not young anymore.Collection: Expectations
I think Julianne Moore is very, very good. I've worked with her. We did Surviving Picasso. I remember one scene we did together. She had to have a nervous, a mental, breakdown in this one scene. I didn't have many lines. I just had to make sure I knew I came in on cue all right. And I was just watching her walking though the rehearsal. I thought I know what she's doing, "This is going to be terrific." So they said, "Are you ready" and she said, "Yeah," "Ok, roll the camera." And all in one take.Collection: Thinking
I don't have any expectations about my films. If they're good, they're good - if they're not, they're not. About 10 years ago, I remember going to see one of my movies - I can't even remember which one now - and everyone was jumping up and down, getting excited, saying what a great film it was going to be. We all went in and watched it, and it was the slowest movie I've ever seen. The next day, the reviews were terrible and half the studio was fired.Collection: Next Day
You're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?Collection: White
I was hell bent on destruction... it was like being possessed by a demon.Collection: Addiction
You look closely enough, you'll find that everything has a weak spot where it can break, sooner or later.Collection: Looks
There's a thing that if you - somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it's a kind of paradox.Collection: Doubt
Certainty is the enemy of mankind. If you're certain about everything, you have the Inquisition, you have Nazis and you have - that certainty is something to be guarded about.Collection: Enemy
Living with reality is a very good trick, it gives you tremendous freedom and it changes the structure of the molecules of your soul by living with reality because you don't expect anything anymore. Which is a weird paradox.Collection: Reality
There are people who are convinced supernatural forces are at work, but I've no idea. I suspect 'possession' might be a psychological thing, like schizophrenia. We all think we know things, but we don't know a damn thing. Whether God exists, why we're here... Nobody really knows any of it.Collection: Thinking
I think one of the things you have to have is a respect for the camera, a real respect, and a real love for it, and to really, when I say take it seriously, quote 'seriously', I mean not patronize it. It's a big mistake to patronize it and think it's a third rate medium, because it's not, it's a great art form.Collection: Art
I love to read, and so I've been reading everything I can, not intensely, but I love to read so I read "Origin of Species" by Darwin and I can't make head or tail of E=MC squared by Einstein, but I try to baffle my way through that.Collection: Reading
I play piano and that's my love. I read and I paint and I compose music, so I've got a pretty full creative life. And it's not because, I'm obsessively creative.Collection: Play
Women never really care to face the truth when their hearts are involved.Collection: Heart
What a glorious night. Every face I see is a memory. It may not be a perfectly perfect memory. Sometimes we had our ups and downs. But we're all together and you're mine for a night. And I'm going to break precedent and tell you my one-candle wish...that you would have a life as lucky as mine, where you can wake up one morning and say, 'I don't want anything more'. Sixty-five years. Don't they go by in a blink?Collection: Morning
You have to have humor. If you don't have humor and you take yourself seriously, you're dead in the water. You have to be jostled. I love it. You've gotta have a laugh. It's better than working for a living.Collection: Water
I'd like to wake up and look like Brad Pitt in the morning, but I don't. I look in the mirror, and I see me.Collection: Morning
I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.Collection: Writing
I'll do anything to keep everyone laughing. Things get too intense on film sets. I remember on The Elephant Man, I used to imitate a cat without moving my lips. David Lynch would say, "Cut! Sorry, we've got a noise somewhere on set." Everyone would be looking around for this cat.Collection: Sorry
I think doubt is a very healthy way to live.Collection: Thinking
As a Welshman that can't sing, I never feel more proud to be Welsh than when I hear the Treorchy Male Choir - the Master Choir of them all. If I could sing I would apply for membership myself.Collection: Males
Acting is a creative process, and directing and music. I think creative people - and I take myself as a creative person and it doesn't mean you have to be an actor, a musician, or a painter - but I think if you are in a creative profession or a creative business you do have a heightened awareness.Collection: Mean
I remember coming to New York, in 1974 to do a play here called Equis. And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets and I thought, "I'm home." I felt really at peace here.Collection: Morning