Top 55 Robert Duvall Quotes

I love working in Texas anywhere.

Look, Hollywood’s a mecca, but it’s not the final answer. You pick up a camera anyplace in the world, you can make a movie.

Very often some of the religious miracle plays you see on television can be very corny, I find. And so simplistic.

I love the smell of juice boxes in the morning.

What drives me is I love my profession. I love to do it.

Sometimes directors will hire you and say, ‘Oh, we love your work.’ And then they start to tell you how to do it. I say, ‘Hey, man, back off. You hired me to do it. Let me do it.’

But for me, the challenge is how you turn a character into behavior. Once the director says ‘action’, you just try to live between those two worlds.

I like to do things that I develop from the ground up.

We all have a cradle-to-the-grave journey to make and, in between, what do you do? There’s got to be something hereafter.

I wanted to show that crime doesn’t pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.

Art is competitive.

The cultural contrast I saw between religions… Catholics have a lot of mediators, going through saints and Mary or whatever. Protestants in general say things to God directly.

Hollywood’s a mecca, but it’s not the final answer. You pick up a camera anyplace in the world, you can make a movie.

Spending two years on my uncle’s ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.

I had a wonderful career.

You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don’t know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

I like the good feeling movies.

When I’m at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.

Some Russian ballet master woman said there’s no culture in America, but if you look you can find interesting stuff in this country, don’t you think?

I don’t have many people showing up at my door. Very few people come out. When they do, I get a little suspicious. I live way up on a hill, way, way back in the country.

I always figure from the cradle to the grave, we all have our individual journeys, and maybe my journey was a positive one and I accomplished certain things without stepping on too many toes.

I’ve always liked country music. It’s a certain aspect of America that goes back to the British Isles and the influence is very native to America.

Way, way, way back I played a little bit, but I am definitely not a golfer. You know, it just takes too much time anyway during the course of the day.

I can always grow a little bit, and try to do something different. So I’m always looking for what’s out there – the potential.

Well, I can’t live without a woman. I have to have a woman, have to have a wife.

The most solitary I ever felt was when I was living in New York. I used to live in Enrico Caruso’s old apartment, and I had a special staircase that took me up to the roof. There was nobody up there.

Some people say, ‘Do you have any theories on acting?’ And I say, well maybe: I think you can start with zero and end with zero. You don’t have to go anywhere, you don’t have to go for the result.

I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft – using yourself to create a character.

We either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the Bible.

I am getting some good offers still. Some nice things are coming my way just as they always have, so unless I lose my inspiration or there is too much drool to wipe, I will keep going.

There was nothing wrong with shouting at God.

Although it wasn’t that easy to do, it was wonderful working with John Wayne.

What people don’t understand about Sarah Palin is that she is a rancher’s wife. From Alberta down to Texas I’ve known women like that: good common sense, bright and vilified by city people.

The money part is one of the most difficult things. Coppola always said I should do a tango movie. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know where we would have gotten the money.

Seeing your name on the list for KP or guard duty when you’re in the Army is like reading a bad review.

Hollywood is still the mecca for good or bad, but it isn’t the beginning or end for filmmaking.

God does guide the lives of individuals and does fill them with the Holy Ghost.

My uncle always said that I could have been a rancher.

The greatest king of Israel, King David, the author of the Psalms, sent a man out to die in battle so that he could sleep with his wife.

You just can’t take a crash course to be a tango dancer in a movie.

It’s like kids playing house: ‘You play the father, I’ll play the mother.’ You know, you dress up, you play, they pay, you go home. It’s a game – acting’s a game.

Stripping away artifice – it’s the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life – but there’s nothing bigger than life.

Around my own friends, I like to mess around.

I’m getting good offers, as good as ever sometimes. I just finished a thing with Billy Bob Thornton that was the most unique part I’ve ever played in my life, in the most unique project.

I’ll keep on acting ’til they wipe the drool. I like the business. I like to do different parts and diverse characters. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm yet!

To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove is my best part.

I try not to look for messages in films.

Today, everything has to be made by committee, and has to have special effects, but there’s always room for good films.

As long as they keep offering me some good parts and so forth – there are some parts out there that fit me pretty well – I’ll keep going for a while.

I was fortunate in the last century to be in the two biggest hits film-wise, ‘Godfather I’ and ‘Godfather II,’ and ‘Lonesome Dove.’

I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher!

I always thought of myself as a later bloomer, so I like some of my work more later than earlier.

I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it’s so rich.

A young actor once asked me, What do you do between jobs? I said, Hobbies, hobbies, and more hobbies.