Hal Holbrook Quotes - Page 2

When the audience begins to see the sunrise on that it's hard for them to turn away from it because they're listening to a man talking to them from over a century ago. And nothing has changed. So what are you going to do about that?

Please don't refer to me as "channeling Mark Twain." I'm an actor. Not a channeler. That word is an iPhone shortcut. Acting is more eloquent than that.

I have a suicide impulse.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.

I don't have a director. The audience directs me.

I've had a very full career in the theater, on stage, in films and on television.

I walked the streets of New York for two years begging for a job, and I couldn't get one.

[Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

I don't play golf. Mark Twain is golf to me.

[Mark] Twain is pointing at you. You, the reader of the book one hundred and thirty years ago and today. That is what has made it a great American novel and the most widely read book in American Literature around the world today.

If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy.