Top 18 Conrad Veidt Quotes

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition – and winning.

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.

I was appalled at the amount of study necessary in order to qualify in medicine, and gradually my desire was blunted by a keener – and secret – wish to become an actor.

I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness.

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad.

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul.

My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn’t until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.

There must have been something in my nature – I believe, with all my heart, that I have conquered it now – which prevented me from being perfectly happy or making a woman perfectly happy.

An actor remembers his first piece of published praise. It is written on his heart.

I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them.

It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being.

I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself.

Have you ever walked late at night through a forest when you are first in love?