Anthony Hopkins
I thought I did play one villain, Hitler, [who is] like Lecter in some ways, but he's a mythical figure, anyway.Collection: Play
My weak spot is that I don't like analyzing so I tend to be a bit lazy; I tend to get bored quickly, which means I must be boring.Collection: Mean
I'm composing and writing music.Collection: Writing
I love the hour in makeup. It gives you time to think and have a cup of coffee. It's my favorite part of the day.Collection: Coffee
When you are at the right age to play Hamlet you are still to young and immature to play it. It is much later, when you get the life experience and the emotional power, that you understand Hamlet or Macbeth.Collection: Emotional
People ask me how did you choose the part and how did you prepare for this work? I just learned the lines and showed up; I don't know what else to say because that's all I know how to do.Collection: People
My life is not my own business.Collection: Life Is
You still wake up sometimes. You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.Collection: Dark
I always distrust the word art when it is applied to acting.Collection: Art
Shakespeare's so bloody difficult, and I don't like failure. You can fail on film, but there's nobody actually there in the flesh to watch you failing.Collection: Failure
I've played a lot of parts. But I don't look at my feeling is that this is a job. It's given me a good living.Collection: Jobs
I could stay making nice safe BBC movies for the rest of my life, so I decided to risk it. It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.Collection: Nice
Things have changed so much now. Everything is downloaded onto computers. I'm not a computer-savvy guy, but with downloading the movie industry has changed.Collection: Guy
I enjoy painting. I don't know if I'm good at it, but I paint. I paint very quickly.Collection: Painting
I just remember Kathy Bates getting on the stage and "The Oscar goes to Anthony Hopkins." I looked around, because I really thought Nick Nolte would get it. I really thought Nick would get it. I was very surprised. It was neck and neck with Nick Nolte and myself. So I really was expecting that to happen, and I went in there without any expectations.Collection: Expectations
Oliver Stone is a great director and I've seen many films over the years, but I try to create stuff out of my own imagination. I want to break all the rules and mess about with it and make a different movie just for the fun of it.Collection: Fun
I drank a lot, but I wouldn't have missed it. I look back on it as sort of dreary enjoyment, because I don't have to be there anymore.Collection: Recovery
I don't know what I believe.Collection: Believe
I don't waste time being soft. I'm not cold, but I don't like being, wasting my time with-life's too short.Collection: Waste
On his Hannibal Lector mask: I've got it at home. I wear it to bed every night.Collection: Home
I have no illusions about my position in this world as an actor or anything like that. I'm very realistic. Reality is a very liberating thing.Collection: Reality
Working with Katherine Hepburn, she said to me, "Don't act." She said, "Read the lines. Just be. Just speak the lines." I said, "Okay." She said, "You look good. You got a good pair of shoulders, you got a good head, good face."Collection: Pairs
I was born in the same town as Richard Burton, the actor, and I saw him, he used to come - he and his wife drove by in the car in my father's shop and Burton would come home from Hollywood and ask him for his autograph, and I thought, I want to be like him. And that's all I said to myself, I want to be like that. I want to get out of this environment of my own empty mind.Collection: Father
I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet acting.Collection: Wall
I'm just an actor. It's the way the script is written, and it's easy. I don't have think about it. When you receive the script, you know pretty well how to play it, apart from little technicalities like the accent.Collection: Thinking
Hitchcock was such a master of putting on screen things that made you uneasy. Somebody once asked him what frightened him most, and he said the police. He came from a poor background. I think he understood those fears.Collection: Thinking
Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn't it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.Collection: Years
Ryan Gosling. He was a good kid, good actor. I like him very much. What was the name of the movie? I've forgotten it. Fracture.Collection: Kids
There is nothing to be scared of in movies. It's a bit scarier going on stage.Collection: Scared
I've been very lucky. I've had my problems in the past, I've had my troubles, but you move on. I had a great life and I am really thankful for it.Collection: Moving
I’m not being cynical, but when you’re doing a movie you have a number of choices as an actor. Then you see it all cut together and all of those precious little pieces you put in are maybe on the cutting room floor. So, you don’t have that much control. You have very little control, in fact.Collection: Cutting
When I direct I try to keep it a unique design of my own. Naturally you're influenced.Collection: Unique
I never make conscious decisions. If my agent says to me, "It's a good script," I'll do it. I don't plan. I've got a lot of things to do. I'm at the roulette table and my luck seems to be running at the moment. I might as well stay there until it runs out.Collection: Running
I wanted to be a musician. I just wanted to be famous because I wanted to escape from what I felt was my limitation in life... And I wanted to write music, and I didn’t know what I was doing and I never had the technique or understanding of it... But I’ve always played the piano and I can improvise on the piano, but the problem is that I can’t write down what I write. I can read music but I can’t write numbers.Collection: Writing
When I was a younger actor, I was very immersed in it, very "method" and all that. Now, I don't give a hoot.Collection: Giving
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.Collection: Movie
Acting is constricted because you have the lines. But I improvise with it and what I learn on the set. I improvise rhythms and just changes.Collection: Acting
I found a way into the acting business because I thought, well, it beats working for a living, and so that's what I do. But I still feel like a bit of a stranger in it all. I've never really belonged anywhere.Collection: Acting
Acting is about listening and reacting. John Wayne was right: Acting is just reacting. You don't have to do much - as long as you stay out of the way of others. That's why it works.Collection: Long
I look in the mirror and I see the lines, but I don't care. It's a good time. I don't know why it's such a good time, but it's a good time.Collection: Mirrors
Getting old ain't for the faint of heart.Collection: Heart
I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.Collection: Sunrise
I love traveling. I like to keep moving. I love the big open spaces in America.Collection: Moving
I love to have a laugh. I like to tease people.Collection: People
I'm having a great life. And I'm 73 and they still phone me up and ask me to do a job here and there.Collection: Jobs
There's no truth in acting, it's all a trick, because you go on stage in front of sets, you're on film - it's all a trick. I'm making it sound very - I really am demystifying it, but what I try to do, what I do, and I hope effectively, is to create a reality as if it is happening now, that you're fishing for words out of the air.Collection: Reality
When you're younger you have a lot of ideas and you're probably more insecure, all those things. I work with young actors now and I see their insecurities and I make fun of them. I don't make fun of them but I make them laugh, because I know what they're going through. When you get older you think 'It's only a movie after all, it's not brain surgery.'Collection: Insecure
How do you play Hannibal Lector? Well just don't move. Scare people by being still.Collection: Moving
It created in me a yearning for all that is wide and open and expansive. Something that will never allow me to fit in in my own country, with its narrow towns and narrow roads and narrow kindnesses and narrow reprimands.Collection: Country