When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges.

When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges.

I've never wanted to become a politician, an interior decorator, I've never wanted to speculate and make a load of money. I just wanted this.

In my youth I dreamed of being an illustrator.

I wasn't at all sure I could make that sort of leap into that sort of comic book reality.

What I wanted more than anything was a long career.

I work primarily for the camera-it's not something I really talk about a lot, but it's part of the way I am as a movie actor. The camera is my girl, as it were.

I was very disappointed that so much of the work I did on The Haunted Mansion didn't arrive in the final cut.

Although you have some films that are a real bummer, there's always a film that comes up where it's just heaven.

It wasn't until I saw James Dean that I began to think that maybe I could actually do this. Movies didn't have to be just this fantasy with this impossibly handsome guy.

I have always had this energy, which I think of as overdrive.

My favorite film is Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power in The Razor's Edge.

In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.

Peter Ustinov was the first really positive influence in my career. He was real and he bore witness to it. The things he said to you, he lived them.

He's Soderbergh, we're working for him. It doesn't matter what he's doing; we'll see it at the premiere.

A lot of newspapers say, Terence Stamp is playing himself and we're as bored as he is.

With Fellini, the fear dropped out of my work because it was such a happy experience... hanging out with Fellini, having pasta on the set with Fellini, and going out with Fellini!

From the very first movie I ever made to the current time, there have been times between action and cut when I've sensed some kind of new dimension that I haven't been familiar with before.

A lot of people only see me as villains.

I've been doing Tai Chi on and off for 20 years. The fundamentals of all martial arts are the same.

At this point, it's either for fun or it's for money. I don't take movies that I don't really like.

As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I'm not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.

Unless I try, I'm never really going to be at ease with myself.

All actors are incredibly insecure.

It's such a performance to bring stuff into America. It's a great luxury when I am in England.

My star was kind of fading towards the end of the '60s and suddenly I got this call from Fellini, who just appeared to kind of love me!

I have to be stretched in some way. There's not enough things that come my way that I fancy.

A lot of young directors, they're not confident; they're not open to the emotional level of the scene.

When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges.

A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

There is no certainty; there is only adventure.

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?

It is to be feared that those who emigrate to New South Wales, generally anticipate too great facility in their future operations and certainty of success in conducting them; but they should recollect that competency cannot be obtained without labour.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.

As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.