James Purefoy Quotes

You need to be disciplined and you need to try to occupy a zone of acting that is always quite scary because you don't think you're doing anything.

I think the James Bond thing has sailed. But of course I would want to be a Bond villain. They are great parts. I think it's highly unlikely, but one can always dream.

One of the reasons a lot of actors go into the business is that for a short period of time, you get to be other people who you can only fantasize about being, by and large.

I like doing things that are very wildly different. I find that the meat and vegetables of being an actor is doing things that are completely different, all the time.

Ancient Rome was a violent place.

One of the things that makes this so topical right now is that I think there are an awful lot of American men - and women, but I'm a man, so that's what I can talk about - who feel the American dream has let them down.

I don't have much time for real violence at all. I think there are infinitely better ways of changing the world than using violence. Sitting round a table talking is a pretty good start.

I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.

It has taken a long time for me to be able to really just be in front of the camera.

If you're playing Hitler, you don't play Hitler as an asshole. Hitler believed what he was doing was right. Any of those monsters and any serial killer believes in what they're doing. I play it subjectively.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

I think the older I get, the less I should be doing.

I like television that grabs you by your throat.

My life is really precious. I don't want to spend it watching ambient TV that just drifts through you. I've got better things to do.

Im not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

I often think that drama helps people feel less lonely about things.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

I couldn't do the same job for 30 years. That would make me want to kill myself. Other people do it and they're very happy doing it, but for me, that's not what I want. I like changing things, all the time.

We start off wearing frilly shirts and britches and being good guys and the heroes. And then as time goes on, every English actor ends up playing bad guys. That's what we do.

I'd never read a piece of television where it's an hour script and it's perfect.

Acting gives me a chance to be people I will never be, in real life. I like changing who I am.

If you're going to lead people, you better know how to manipulate people, and you have to be pretty smart to be able to do that.

Somebody doing something effortlessly is a lovely thing to watch.

Ring tones are just irritating, aren't they?

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.

I really do want to just be able to sit in the corner of the pub with my friends... to just be an actor and still go to the supermarket and not get bothered.

One of the things that I discovered in my research is that some serial killers build an ultimate reality around themselves that they believe in, 100%.

Actors are their own worst enemies. They quite often will get in their own way, and I have to be encouraged, endlessly, not to get in my own way.

To be brutally honest, I am a little bit of a Clint Eastwood nerd. Clint Eastwood who was the man who drew me into movies. When everybody else was watching Star Wars, I was watching Fistful of Dollars.

Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.

What I went into the acting business for was to have a certain amount of chaos in my life. I don't know what I'm doing next. It's exciting. That's the way I like it.

I've never been "celeb-y" actor. You know, you don't catch me falling out of nightclubs at three o'clock in the morning. Well, very rarely! But I find it all a bit baffling, the whole celeb thing and I don't really get it.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn't seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

One of the great things about drama is that it makes you feel like you're not a crackpot, and that there are other people who think and feel the way you do.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don't just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.