Montgomery Clift

The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.

Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.

The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.

Look, I'm not odd. I'm just trying to be an actor; not a movie star, an actor.