Top 75 John Hurt Quotes

I have died in so many spectacular ways, and I remember shooting them all, too. I imagine all those deaths will flash in front of me when I’m on my death bed, faced with the real thing.

Ultimately, the film industry has always pushed out its biggies, and I don’t have a problem with that. I just wish that we’d spend more time nurturing the smaller ones.

I gave up religious thinking a long time ago and am really just an agnostic now.

I remember once when I told Lindsay Anderson at a party that acting was just a sophisticated way of playing cowboys and Indians he almost had a fit.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn’t it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

It’s quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

It’s an immensely competitive business, and I can tell you the older you get, the parts are fewer, and the people who are proven performers are greater.

I’ve done some stinkers in the cinema. You can’t regret it; there are always reasons for doing something, even if it’s just the location.

Essentially, I am an actor for hire. I am not a rarified creature. I do all these different things, and they all interest me.

Also the wonderful thing about film, you can see light at the end of the tunnel. You did realise that it is going to come to an end at some stage.

My father’s a clergyman, and he was in the mission field for a certain amount of time in British Honduras, which is now Belize.

I’m not accustomed to doing films without seeing the script.

I didn’t consider myself to be pretty, not at all.

My surname certainly suggests a man whose destiny has always been injury.

Don’t forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: ‘Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain’t coming across to me?’ It is to be shared.

I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I’m still embarrassed at the word.

I mark a script like an exam, and I try not to do anything under 50 per cent. Similarly with the part. And also film is a peculiar thing, parts don’t necessarily read in script form anything like as well as they can do when it comes to materialising.

Nudes are the greatest to paint. Everything you can find in a landscape or a still life or anything else is there: darkness and light, character dimension, texture. I painted heads too, of course.

I don’t like it when people shout on stage without any particular reason. It carries no weight.

I’ve never changed the way I live. I still walk the streets; I don’t give a damn. And everyone’s very nice to me. But this new idea of being famous for no reason at all? I can’t actually get my head round it.

I don’t care about the length of anything I play, as long as it’s a good character.

I’m somewhat old-fashioned, and I still talk about playing a part. I don’t talk about my work – ‘I’ve seen some of your work’ – there’s not much work in it, is there?

There’s an awful lot of hanging around when you’re doing science fiction. Going down and waiting for them to set up, being told to go back to your dressing room while they change the track and the lighting and so on.

‘The Naked Civil Servant’ was as important for me as ‘Easy Rider’ was for Jack Nicholson. No question.

Actors are not always the best judges. We have a peculiar idea of what we think we are, and sometimes it’s best left to others to decide what we play.

I never quite understand why we watch the news. There doesn’t really seem much point watching somebody tell you what the news is when you could quite easily listen to it on the radio.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

Early on, I didn’t intend to have children. I thought it was too difficult a world for them. But then it happened, and I am thrilled to have them now.

I’ve been incredibly lucky with the directors I’ve worked with.

The most difficult thing about painting is the self-discipline. When I finish a job, I give myself a few days, but then I have to discipline myself quite fiercely if I want to do some painting that’s worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re just doodling. It’s much easier when you’re just told what you have to do.

I think fame makes people a bit nervous.

As Beckett said, it’s not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.

Things come in a quieter way to me. It’s not laziness, and it’s not diffidence. I just know how far you have to bend for work. That’s important for me.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

How my film career happened, I don’t know. It was unplanned. I’d been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ in 1975 that put me on the radar.

I’m very much of the opinion that to work is better than not to work.

I’ve never guided my life. I’ve just been whipped along by the waves I’m sitting in. I don’t make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?

Everybody, I think, that was in ‘Harry Potter’ was certainly introduced to an enormous lot of young people.

Society is constantly recalibrating, redefining what it considers to be moral and immoral.

I love the uilleann pipes and listen to Ronan Browne who’s an uilleann piper.

I seem to watch less and less television. The best thing in ‘Downton Abbey’ is Penelope Wilton. She is always worth the watch.

I’ve always felt, and I think I’m qualified to say so because I’ve won a few awards, that it’s a terrible shame to put something in competition with something else to be able to sell something.

We’re all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There’s no point in saying you’ve got the establishment wrong because they hadn’t got the establishment wrong, they’d got it absolutely dead on.

Not everyone wants to see children’s films, comics, and supermen.

Everything that came to me, in terms of the ritzier side of performing, was a plus.

There are situations where you are left robbed of all quality of life, and I believe it is entirely up to you how you want to deal with that. You can follow the dictates of religion if that is what you believe in, or you can take a personal decision.

Where humanity is going to find itself in, say, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years would be very difficult to predict, I think. There are moments, of course, when you think that it’s going from bad to worse, but there are other moments when you think that human efforts are really flowering into something really fantastic.

I like the physical activity of gardening. It’s kind of thrilling. I do a lot of weeding.

If I’m doing a play, 30 to 40 percent of the people that come to the stage door have pictures of ‘Alien’ for me to autograph. And usually, the photos are pretty gory ones.

If you do an interview in 1960, something it’s bound to change by the year 2000. And if it doesn’t, then there’s something drastically wrong.

I see myself as an interpretative actor rather than a creative one.

For everything that you find dreadful, there’s usually something that is rather marvelous as well.

I’d love to be one of those people who, whenever you see them, you feel pleased.

My mother’s father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

The things that I’ve enjoyed most are not really science fiction. They are not much fun to make because there are so many toys involved. They are fun for directors who like toys, like Ridley Scott, but they are not a lot of fun to make. A lot of hanging around, changing this and that.

I think people should be protected from being made to feel that they want to know what somebody famous had for breakfast.

I find it hard to imagine that anyone could be intimidated by me.

I’ve never been pushy. People have said I should have been, more, but I’m not sure. I’ve watched hugely ambitious people: the minute they’ve got a success, they know where it’s going, they know how to deal with it, and it all happens for them. Great. But that’s not the way I – well, I don’t like to use the word ‘operate’.

I was completely crazy and mad when I was young. I was absolutely in love with the dissolute.

Human beings are very good at adapting to what happens.

Picasso was hugely innovative, and, wow, did he have facility, amazing ability, but I don’t think he painted a masterpiece.

I knew I wanted to act from a very young age – from about nine, really – but I didn’t know how to go about it. I had no idea. The world was a much bigger place then.

I think love can be really tough. Because it involves ultimately an honesty to the nth degree that you are capable of. Once said, you’ve lost your deposit. It’s best if you don’t say it.

I first got involved with Mel Brooks through ‘The Elephant Man.’ Everybody knows now, but they didn’t know at the time that he was the producer.

I don’t think you automatically become an enlightened person because you are a daddy. But they will change you, of course – their understanding of you puts you in a different place.