Anthony Hopkins

This industry has been really good to me. It's been a great life. I'm not through yet. I'm ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

We are fascinated by the darkness in ourselves, we are fascinated by the shadow, we are fascinated by the bogeyman.

Danger is the spice of life and you’ve got to take a risk now and then…that’s what makes life worthwhile.

You look closely enough, you'll find that everything has a weak spot where it can break, sooner or later.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

If you don't follow through on your dreams, you might as well be a vegetable.

Getting old ain't for the faint of heart.

I'm most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page sunrise over the desert and masses of a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

I've felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father's family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

I was lousy in school. Real screwed-up. A moron. I was antisocial and didn't bother with the other kids. A really bad student. I didn't have any brains. I didn't know what I was doing there. That's why I became an actor.

I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we've had.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.

People forget that Mozart wrote for commissions. There's a thing in psychology where they think if it's popular, it can't be serious.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Once you begin to fall off the track and believe you breathe different air to everyone else, you're doomed; you're finished.

I remember coming to New York, in 1974 to do a play here called Equis. And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets and I thought, "I'm home." I felt really at peace here.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one's nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

Beware the tyranny of the weak. They just suck you dry.

I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time.