Laurence Olivier Quotes - Page 2

If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights.

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

You must have - besides intuition and sensitivity - a cutting edge that allows you to reach what you need. Also, you have to know life - bastards included - and it takes a bit of one to know one, don't you think?

If you're an artist, you've got to prove it.

In the great wealth, the great firmament of your nation's generosities this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric, but the mere fact of it . . . the prodigal, pure, human kindness of it . . . must be seen as a beautiful star in that firmament which shines upon me at this moment, dazzling me a little, but filling me with warmth of the extraordinary elation, the euphoria that happens to so many of us at the first breath of the majestic glow of a new tomorrow.

Lead the audience by the nose to the thought.

Acting, is not a profession for adults.

We ape, we mimic, we mock. We act.

Without acting, I cannot breathe.

I often think that could we creep behind the actor's eyes, we would find an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Domesday Book.

Work is life for me, it is the only point of life - and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.

Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator.

[May 1958, on playing Macbeth at age 30 and age 48] When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part.

Scratch an actor and you'll find an actor.

There is a spirit in us that makes our brass to blare and our cymbals crash-all, of course, supported by the practicalities of trained lung power, throat, heart, guts.

We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses.

If he was lost for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey.

I'm rather bored by the subject - meaning me. It's a sort of a yoke, but at times you know, a yoke is a kind of comfort. And it's always there.

I believe in the theater; I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.

Autograph-hunting is the most unattractive manifestation of sex-starved curiosity.

I have to act to live.

A sexual athlete is not likely to find sufficient energy for work of another athletic kind, and the acting of great parts most definitely was and always will be athletic, depending on inner if not on visible energy. Members of other professions that depend on the expenditure of physical energy must, I believe, find similar difficulties when attempting to double up on their energies. One has often heard that the most magnificent specimens of boxers, wrestlers and champions in almost every branch of athletic sport prove to be disappointing upon the removal of that revered jockstrap.

[on whether he harbored any resentment at his forced retirement from the stage after he was fired by Britain's National Theater] I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare... An actor must act.

My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself.

The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.