Quotes By Anthony Hopkins

What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That's the way I always work.

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

I never make conscious decisions.

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

It's such a pleasant surprise when you come on set and you find someone in charge like Ken Branagh or James Ivory. You know that you're going to do a day's work and at the end of it, it's going to be good.

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I know that some actors and directors like to have intensity on set. I don't, particularly. Certainly, if they want that, that's fine, but I can't work like that.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

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

Oh yes. I'm an actor, so I just learn my lines, and show up and do it. I gave it a little bit of thought.

I like the good life too much, I'm not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

Richard Burton came from the same town as me, so I thought I'd follow my nose, and follow my luck. I think I've been very lucky.

It was a challenge, to work with Oliver Stone.

I love life because what more is there?

My philosophy is: It's none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

I worked with Steven Spielberg on Amistad... he seemed so very secure in himself that he let me do things.

I have dual citizenship, it just so happens I live in America.

I can't stand directors who try to micro-manage everything. When it happens these days I just walk off set, saying if they don't like the way I'm doing it they can get someone else.

Actors I admire? Ed Harris, or course, I think he's terrific; because I know he always had to fight being what he looked like a lot, but I think he's a terrific actor.

We all dream. We dream vividly, depending on our nature. Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we're atheist.

I've got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I've done it.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

I know that the arts are important. I'm not denying that, but I can't associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

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.

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.

A conductor can't be too arrogant with an orchestra and try to impose himself too much.

I'm interested in the dream and subconscious mind, the peculiar dream-like quality of our lives, sometime nightmare quality of our lives.

Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore; only the life I have lived. The pain now is part of the happiness then.

My father was grounded, a very meat-and-potatoes man. He was a baker.

I have a punishing workout regimen. Every day I do 3 minutes on a treadmill, then I lie down, drink a glass of vodka and smoke a cigarette.