John Hurt

Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.

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

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.

I think fame makes people a bit nervous.

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

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.

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.

The clergy is in the same business as actors, just a different department.

Everybody's got to work with Roger Corman. You can't leave out that experience.

I've done all sorts of children's things before, but none as big as 'Harry Potter.'

I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say 'high Anglo-Catholic' would be a real English understatement.

The difference between anger and deep remorse - remorse is much fatter. It's a deeper feeling altogether. Anger is too easy an escape for my money.

Parents are the worst teachers, if they are good at it and you're not. My father thought I was the densest offspring he could have produced.

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

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 turn up in Los Angeles every now and then, so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

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.

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

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

Human beings are very good at adapting to what happens.

To me, nothing ever feels like a sure thing. I cling to that because it's very important you don't ever think anything is a sure thing.

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

I don't know whether I inspire anything in anyone.

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

Everyone I've ever played has been flawed.

I knew I didn't want to pursue an academic career at all, which, of course, my father would have loved me to have done. I didn't want to go to university. The only other thing I could do was paint, and so I went to art school because they couldn't conceive of how one would be an actor.

I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.

My criteria when looking for a role is that I will do anything that stands the chance of succeeding on the level it is intended to. After that, if it's a part I can do something personal with.

It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.

Life is full of ironies and paradoxes.

I like entertaining. I adore it. I feel I'm in the right place. Without question.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone.

I can't say that I wouldn't prefer to make small films, basically because I think they are probably more interesting in terms of the material. But every now and again, it's quite good to do a big one.

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?

I've done a couple of conferences where you sit and sign autographs for people, and then you have photographs taken with them and a lot of them all dressed up in alien suits or 'Doctor Who' whatevers. I was terrified of doing it because I thought they'd all be loonies, but they are absolutely, totally charming as anything. It's great fun.

I'm horribly self-critical.

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.

The first thing you have to get used to in any kind of acting is the ability to make a fool of yourself. If you haven't learnt how to make a fool of yourself, you shouldn't be on the boards. That's absolutely what it's all about.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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'm not really a big musical fan. I enjoyed 'West Side Story' when it came out, but it gets a bit tired in the end.

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.

I am not an enormous believer in research being the be-all and end-all. I get suspicious when I read about actors spending six months in a clinic, say, in order to play someone who is sick.

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

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever, you know? Whatever your pool is.

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.

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

I didn't want to teach. I wanted to act. It was quite a long and difficult road to get there but very thrilling when I did.

I say you play a part, you don't work one.

I put everything I can into the mulberry of my mind and hope that it is going to ferment and make a decent wine. How that process happens, I'm sorry to tell you I can't describe.

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

Really, I'm only alive out of curiosity. I'm very curious about where we're all marching.

You can see areas where maybe you got a bit lazy, perhaps, or you see when you were really on form. I think an actor is very like a sportsman in that respect. You have periods where you're in terrific form. Everything you touch seems to work and come right. And other times, when you're working really hard, it's okay, but it isn't scintillating.

You can't lose your concentration at all. And there are times when you're on the stage, and you've got silence, which is wonderful, but you have to have the confidence to make you realize it's fine. You can't suddenly wobble and think, 'They're not interested.'

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

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

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.

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.

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

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.

I have done quite a lot of outsider figures.

I've lived publicly and never hidden behind closed doors. Therefore, if I have gone over the top sometimes, it has been visible.

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?

The English National Opera does have some terrific productions, which are accessible, and they're not too ridiculously expensive.

I'm not interested in awards. I never have been. I don't think they are important. Don't get me wrong, if somebody gives me a prize, I thank them as gratefully as I know how, because it's very nice to be given a prize. But I don't think that awards ought to be sought.

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.

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

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'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.

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

This whole theory of alienation that intellectuals have been passing on, really is just to stop a lot of ham acting. If you fill something with a proper emotion, it didn't worry him at all.

One thing that is likely to make you lose touch is if you keep in touch with the past too much.

I'm essentially the result of other people's imagination. And that's fine. Because of other people's imagination, I've played parts I would never have thought I could do. Still, I've never had a hankering or an ambition for any particular role.

I'm fascinated by the business of belief, obviously, because it's so ever present with humanity anyway. And, you know, when you have science, which constantly talks of proofs, you have religion, which constantly talks of beliefs and faith and so on.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

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.

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

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

Half the stuff I have done which has been successful would never have been made if it had been shown to focus groups.

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

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'.

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.

Religious people know deep down that that is the most vulnerable area of their lives, and when others question it, they are liable to hit out and feel insulted. You know it is absolutely without proof, yet people still commit themselves totally to this belief. They cannot refute it because it is so central to their lives.