Alan Rickman Quotes

• "A journalist's lasso... the guy who plays villains."
• "Acting - it's a question of watch and learn-fast."
• "Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent."
• "Acting is not something I'll stop doing. I can't see how. You're always reacting as well as performing."
• "Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over."
• "All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening."
• "An actor has to protect himself a bit. And yet be very open. To be both fit and open is a hard balance to achieve."
• "An actor likes to be treated in a certain way, to work in a certain manner."
• "As a writer you are involved in a much more mysterious process. An actor or director is an interpreter."
• "As we get older, we are all waiting on the shore. It's the young who walk out into the world we have made for them."
• "At least I'm not being stoned in the street here for having dared to try."
• "At Stratford-Upon-Avon you learned how to bark at 1,500 people."
• "Certain features, that if they're lit from certain angles-it's out of story books, it's out of The Wizard of Oz."
• "Certain things that one does get more focus than others."
• "Coming back to do a play at a Scottish festival must seem very perverse. Even I thought I was mad."
• "Directing takes such a big lump out of your life."
• "Each character I play has different dimensions. I'm not interested in words that pull them together."
• "Hans, my Die Hard character, is a really good part; bad guys are fun to play, although I don't want to make a habit of it."
• "I am hellbent on defying your expectations, at every turn, and even if you don't like what's being done, I dare you to find it uninteresting."
• "I am the character you are not supposed to like."
• "I came off a huge-budgeted Hollywood movie and went to a place where you could hear yourself think."
• "I can't answer for what the director or the studio do."
• "I cannot take responsibility for people's fantasy. I can't think about it, I can't live with it and I won't dwell on it."
• "I couldn't have done the film without computer graphics."
• "I do feel more myself in America. I can regress there, and they have roller-coaster parks."
• "I don't eat the right food, I'm not a monk, and I'm very gregarious. But I'm not stupid."
• "I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next half hour."
• "I don't mind seducing as long as at the end of the seduction there's an idea or a shock."
• "I don't think acting is about competition. I'm glad if people like one's work, but why turn it into something else?"
• "I don't think it's right that everybody knows everything about me."
• "I don't want to drag anybody anywhere. But where were you born?"
• "I drive a car in L.A., and I don't here. I feel more in charge of myself."
• "I find myself becoming less and less enamoured of public statement-I'd rather see it in action."
• "I flew to New York for a preview and the audience just sttod up and cheered and threw things at the screen."
• "I found the actual work of directing had very little to do with going up to actors and saying things."
• "I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: You're going to forget your lines."
• "I have absolutely no time for margaret Thatcher's England. I think she is a narrowwing pernicious influence."
• "I have this feeling that if I could sort out what's on my dining room table, everything would fall into place."
• "I hope the audience will see the play as more than just applicable to actors. It's also about lying, and how close acting is to madness."
• "I just want bigger challenges, to touch that unknown part where you're not just a collection of other people's preconceptions."
• "I know that we would not be sitting here doing this without Hollywood. It's Hollywood which puts you on the bigger map."
• "I love to travel and I don't have children, so there is a certain freedom."
• "I might very well break the picture by playing it so-well, so grand-manner."
• "I need time to go home and find out who I am."
• "I only saw Magnolia recently, and thought it was just brilliant."
• "I think it's a disgrace that English actors get taken advantage of. It's very different here."
• "I think that true creativity is also linked to discipline. Even if it's just a budget nailing you down, it helps creativity."
• "I think there's some connection between absolute discipline and absolute freedom."
• "I think worrying things are going on in England-a real apathy."
• "I thought it was interesting that the audiences hated the Marquise and let the Vicomte off the hook. People still allow Valmonts in this world."
• "I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure."
• "I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking, This is exciting."
• "I was always used to seeing my mother in the brightest of colours."
• "I was just relieved to get from one end of the play to the other. It is ludicrous in having four soliloques coming one after another."
• "I was playing somebody who was basically an alcoholic. And I think people got very upset that they weren't seeing a great hero."
• "I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do, and just in time. In acting, you can't hang about too long."
• "I went straight from filming Mesmer, which was difficult, to doing Mike Newell's An Awfully Big Adventure which was a breeze."
• "I wouldn't dream of being out there as an actor looking for work."
• "I'd been doing some amateur theater. Our design group was very successful, but I could also see that it was just going to repeat itself."
• "I'm a Piscean. In every area of my life complete opposites are at work all the time."
• "I'm a quite serious actor who doesn't mind being ridiculously comic."
• "I'm always aware of the camera and it feels like that's the audience."
• "I'm as neurotic as the next person when it comes to being asked constantly to produce qualities which actuallly have nothing to do with you."
• "I'm aware of lots of cross currents rather than separating things out."
• "I'm playing an angel in Kevin Smith's new film, Dogma, so there's a lot of wings sprouting out of people's backs."
• "I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yoghurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola."
• "I've had to guide my career and seize any opportunity that came my way."
• "I've never been able to plan my life. I just lurch from indecision to indecision."
• "If a camera is placed endlessly on the floor in all your shots, and looks up your nostrils-you know, it's not just me."
• "If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust."
• "If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work."
• "If you could build a house on a trampoline, that would suit me fine."
• "If you have your eye trained, it affects what you do in a rehearsal room or on stage in terms of its space and a sense of texture and colour."
• "If you look at the movies that I've done, it's like three good guys to three bad guys-and one unnameable."
• "If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation."
• "In England, we have these things called football hooligans, and I think that's slightly what I'm seeing."
• "It never felt like a sudden switch to me. The curse of our times is that you are supposed to decide your life at 16 and stick to that."
• "It was a great experience, and sometimes it was just awful. But I imagine that's true of any film. You can't predict what it's going to be like."
• "It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising."
• "It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in. There's a horrible inexcapability to it."
• "It's all air and water in my chart. Nothing to hold me down. Luckily, there is some fire there. That must be from my mum-she was a Sagittarian."
• "It's also a curious thing to be doing because I haven't been on stage for four years."
• "It's disgusting and wonderful. Like going to Dunkin' Donuts for lunch every day."
• "It's just a life on the move, really, and that's the way I prefer it. I like to present a moving target."
• "Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there."
• "Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made."
• "Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive."
• "Maybe you'd get hurt by criticism, I don't know. Perhaps everybody does; I don't think anybody reaches a point where you're inured to it."
• "Mesmer has been seen at the Montreal and Vienna Film Festivals and was invited to the New York Film Festival, but wasn't allowed to go."
• "Most of our lives, we function with a big divide between here and here."
• "Most of the 14 films I've done, however, have been independents shot in Europe and Great Britain."
• "My blood is awash with Welsh and Irishness which probably explains a lot about a lot. What I hope it means is being not closed."
• "My first major part was in his adaptation of Jonson's The Devil is an Ass and I've worked with him four or five times since."
• "My friend Bob Hoskins says filmmaking is like being pecked to death by pigeons. I would use a more violent bird."
• "My girlfriend is the ultimate leveler. When I whine about my work, she'll fire back at me some well-aimed sentence about the homeless."
• "My idea of a real treat is Magic Mountain without standing in line."
• "My life became a cartoon. I'd just finished on Broadway doing this tough play, and suddenly I moved from the dark into the neon light."
• "My mother was widowed young-I was the second of four children and she raised us on her own."
• "My parents certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident."
• "My whole life's been lived in west London-born, schooled, art-schooled, drama-schooled."
• "Nothing gives me as much pleasure as travelling. I love getting on trains and boats and planes."
• "Nothing is like anything else and I'm not thinking of anything else I've done, just the job in hand."
• "Oh, yeah, I'm angry. I'm passionately angry at this country. Twelve years of a Tory government has left the theater in tatters."
• "On film you put all your energies into a single glance."
• "On film you're perhaps spending most of the time waiting to work and so you've got to keep that energy release in check... but not let it go to sleep."
• "One longs for a director with a sense of imagination."
• "One of the concerns I had... was a culture which puts its actors on pedestals."
• "One of the pleasures of filmmaking is the cushion of support that inflates around you, and you really feel it as the weeks go on."
• "People don't think they need to do rep; they think you can come out and be a star overnight, like the Brit pack."
• "Probably to some extent, one's aware of moments when you have stamped your little foot in a childish way."
• "Robin's Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right-but goodness, this is a costume melodrama, not Shakespeare."
• "Since I'd been doing a play for two years, I didn't want to get on a stage again; I needed some kind of explosion to take it away."
• "So much newsprint is devoted to the lives and opinions of actors. I'm still really unsure about how much of that is relevant."
• "Some actors have opportunities and shapes given to them. Not me."
• "Some things I'm offered in the States, I can't actually see why anyone's bothering except for the pay cheque. You read the script and think, Why?"
• "Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch."
• "Sometimes I think that in an ideal world, three children, aged 12, 10, and 8, would be dropped on us and we would be great parents for that family."
• "Sometimes you see a film and make a mental note that you want to work with that particular director."
• "Susan Sarandon said a wonderful thing to me once: Don't think about it too much; that was my mistake."
• "Talent is an accident of genes-and a responsibility."
• "The aim is never to generalize. That's your job. It's about seeing in three dimensions as much as possible."
• "The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial."
• "The best creative talents have gone to the ad agencies... recent times have been terrible, terrible years for the cultural life of this country."
• "The greatest thing is to be able to do something out of the blue that you couldn't have predicted and is free of any preconceptions."
• "The imagination has a whole load of ideas and the equipment seems to be less and less capable of matching the imagination!"
• "The main trouble is that as an actor you've got too many memories of horrible rehearsals."
• "The memories I have of my father are those you have as an 8-year-old. Yes, his death was a huge thing to happen to four kids under 10."
• "The nights when you're feeling free in the wings and you go out there, then suddenly something tightens up."
• "The play is as seductive as any of its characters."
• "The play makes the rules. This play is about couples who swim in and out of focus."
• "The three bad guys I've done have been in big, Hollywood expensive things, and the good guys are in small movies-small budgets, at least."
• "The whole business of laying yourself on the line is difficult whatever the character. It's my life as well as my work."
• "The whole essence of Valmont was surface: dirt under polished fingernails."
• "There are a lot of gremlins out there for both of us."
• "There are little messages going on inside you all the time. Little hands are going up inside you, saying, Excuse me!"
• "There are particular muscles which go flabby if you don't use them."
• "There can be a huge buzz in acting but the thing is... the moments are frequently followed by a very swift kick in the guts or smack to the head."
• "There was an inevitability about my being an actor since about the age of 7, but there were other roads that had to be traveled first."
• "There we were, hardly taking off any clothes, and, as a friend put it, there wasn't a dry seat in the house."
• "There you are, 15 feet across the screen, and people can visit all sorts of fantasies on your face that are nothing to do with you."
• "There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do."
• "There's no master plan. It's not calculated. Every choice is taken on its own terms."
• "This torn cartilage is my souvenir of Hollywood."
• "To come to film too prepared could be a problem as well. Too unwilling to throw it away and do something else."
• "To work with Ninagawa is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just one question. Are we supposed to like those young people?"
• "Unfortunately a lot of this film industry arguing is not about films but about the size of people's willies."
• "Valmont had such a complicated psyche, you couldn't say that about Hans Gruber."
• "We all say lots of stupid things that, you know, you wish you could take back."
• "What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves."
• "What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing."
• "When I get off the plane in England I always feel about two inches shorter."
• "When the film ends, the conversation begins with the audience, and that's a new one every night it plays."
• "When you come off the stage, you want to walk out into life."
• "Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play."
• "You are given this thing and everybody has talent... mine just happens to be for acting and that creates a situation like this."
• "You can lull the paying customers as long as they get slapped."
• "You can never predict what you're going to say yes and no to 'cause it'll probably depend on what you just did."
• "You can't be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and a lot of bloody hard work."
• "You can't judge your characters; that's the last thing you can ever do. You've got to go in there informed, but innocent."
• "You don't always look ahead, but you turn equally to the past. I think of that more and more."
• "You don't always want to do the same thing again. A life of endless repetition wouldn't make sense at any level."
• "You either want to say those lines, or you don't."
• "You interrupt your instincts by explaining. I took one look at Stanislavsky and closed the book very quickly."
• "You only speak as a human being in life and, therefore, you're trying to reproduce life onstage."
• "You start to notice that if you get into a limousine, it's only there for as long as you're selling the movie."
• "You watch yourself doing things because you have set in motion events which will change your life."
• "You're there with these characters looking at life through generations."
• "You're too busy sensing other people's fear rather than your own."
• "I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously."