Al Pacino Quotes

It's easy to fool the eye but it's hard to fool the heart.

Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.

I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping. It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.

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.

I was playing a part of someone dealing dope on a street corner - and there was a guy actually dealing heroin right there. I looked at him, he looked at me, and I got real confused.

At this point in my career, I don't have to deal with audition rejections. So I get my rejection from other things. My children can make me feel rejected. They can humble you pretty quick.

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.

Man is a little bit better than his reputation, and a little bit worse

There are a couple of times I would've liked to have married. I think I made a mistake, especially once.

A kiss is a lusty dollop of dessert to be served with desire and savored with passion.

I'm an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.

I don't talk politics and I don't talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.

The problem with me is, I guess, the way I express myself, you have to be with me 50 years before you can get a sense of what I'm talking about.

Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don't believe me when I tell them. That's how I saw myself, in comedy.

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.

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.

When I was younger, I would go to auditions to have the opportunity to audition, which would mean another chance to get up there and try out my stuff, or try out what I learned and see how it worked with an audience, because where are you gonna get an audience?

Without coffee something’s missing

Drinking and smoking grass were a part of my life as far back as I can remember.

You need some insecurity if you're an actor. It keeps the pot boiling. I haven't yet started to think about retiring. I was shocked when I heard about Paul Newman retiring at age 82. Most actors just fade away like old soldiers.

Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, but don't swallow.

They say we die twice - once when the last breath leaves our body and once when the last person we know says our name.

The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work. And I didn't think about the material as much. But sometimes I've thought about the material a lot and thought I was doing the right thing, and it didn't work out.

Actors are always outsiders. It's necessary to be able to interpret - and that gets distorted when you become famous.

Romantic love can be a lot of crap, though, let me tell you. And it can hurt you.

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story, the story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I'm struggling with - my own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.

The fruit falls off the tree. You don't shake it off before it's ready to fall.

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

I hope the perception is that I'm an actor, I never intended to be a movie star.

I'm not a violent person, never was, but I have this temperament that I've always displayed. I guess it has to do with my tradition and being Italian, we're very outgoing with our emotions.

You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.

Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.

I don't think actors should ever expect to get a role, because the disappointment is too great. You've got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition's an opportunity to have an audience.

If you get all tangled up, just tango on.

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.

Learning (Shakespeare's plays) ...in school was a bit of a bore.

There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty. Lee Strasberg is like that, my grandfather was like that. These are the kinds of men I've had close relationships with.

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.

We were doing Scarface many years ago...and I remember having my coffee and looking at the beach, the surf, and I saw a hundred people looking out into the ocean. I thought, what's going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director, Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.

I didn't go for the needle at all. I never cared for drugs, because I saw what they did to most people. I thought that was the end of the road.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

I once asked my oldest daughter [Julia Marie] if she thought about changing her name in school and she said, "No, I'm a Pacino. That's my name." I just wondered how it would feel, how people would treat her, but she's adjusted so marvelously.

It's so funny when people who are not used to making movies get into it. You just can't believe how insufferably boring it is. Waiting around and doing these lines over and over and finally having to go in and loop the lines and dub them.

It's not personal, it's strictly business

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.

Either I act or I die.

It used to worry me what people said about me. I'm learning not to worry as much. Sometimes you feel critics are wrong all the time, but I don 't take objection to it, because that's the way it goes. They can be wrong, they can be right. They can be cruel, they can be kind.

I used to say I wanted to genuflect to a woman, put her up on a pedestal higher and higher, way up beyond my grasp...Then I'd find another one.