Anthony Hopkins Quotes

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.

When you begin to believe you have license because you are a special person breathing special oxygen, that's when you're in big trouble. That's the road to insanity. And a lot of people in the studios are like that. They believe that they are special. I do think actors are blessed, or cursed, with maybe a slightly heightened awareness, which you have to use.

If I spent all my time criticising myself, I wouldn't be able to function. There are actors who theorise till the cows come home. I haven't the patience for them. It's maybe shallow, but that's why I'll never be part of the acting set.

I never make conscious decisions.

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.

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.”

I've got a great sense of humor.

If you don't go when you want to go, when you do go, you'll find you've gone.

I'm the slowest driver in the world.

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.

My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.

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.

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.

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

I am young! Being creative and keeping your brain occupied is very sensible because if you don't you die, slowly.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

When I direct I try to keep it a unique design of my own. Naturally you're influenced.

I've felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father's family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

I have dual citizenship, it just so happens I live in America.

I just learn my lines, go on set. Do my preparation, whatever that is. Have a cup of coffee. Say hello to everyone. And be friendly. "Action" - and then do it.

I’m not young anymore. I don’t wanna start over again.

On his Hannibal Lector mask: I've got it at home. I wear it to bed every night.

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.

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.

My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

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."

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

How do you play Hannibal Lector? Well just don't move. Scare people by being still.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It's a death trap.

I'm devious, cruel, cunning and addictive.

I'm married. My wife, Stella - a beautiful woman. She's brought a lot of peace to my life, a lot of wisdom.

I love traveling. I like to keep moving. I love the big open spaces in America.

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.

I'm interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

When I was a young guy, I knew everything. Now I know very little. I know less and less as the time goes on.

People don't always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don't advance in life.

There is nothing to be scared of in movies. It's a bit scarier going on stage.

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.

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I hate taxing my mind with analysis. I'm not a good analyst. I cannot talk about acting. I hate talking about it. I hate talking about analyzing.

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.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Israel means war and destruction and we Americans are behind this war and I am ashamed of being American.

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.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

I think doubt is a very healthy way to live.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.