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Quotes by John Hurt

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.
– John Hurt
As Beckett said, it's not enough to die, one has to be forgotten as well.
– John Hurt
As far as movies go, my master is Fred Zinnemann.
– John Hurt
Being a painter is a lonely, desolate life, but I learned by observing people, observing conditions around me, the way things worked. And I've found that painting-which I still do-has helped me a great deal as an actor. There's a surprising amount in common.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.
– John Hurt
I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid $75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.
– John Hurt
I loathed school. I don't have an academic mind, and besides I was so bored by my teachers! How teachers can take a child's inventiveness and say yes, yes, in that pontifical way of theirs, and smother everything!
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
I think it would be very difficult to play somebody if they didn't think they had any virtues or redeeming characteristics.
– John Hurt
I think the director, John Huston, took on the picture because he's been trying to outdo his father, Walter Huston, and that's impossible. How do you cope with a genius? I couldn't communicate with my own father.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
I was keen on sports-that's how my nose got this way. It's not actually broken; the nose was just pushed up a little bit and moved over. It's an aquiline nose, quite Irish.
– John Hurt
I've spent a great deal of my life doing independent film, and that is partly because the subject matter interests me and partly because that is the basis of the film industry. That's where the filmmakers come from, it's where they start and sometimes its where they should have stayed.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
It would be difficult to have any unfulfilled ambitions because I don't have any ambitions. I've never been that kind of performer.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
My parents felt that acting was far too insecure. Don't ask me what made them think that painting would be more secure.
– John Hurt
My springboard is always the script. Even if the script is taken from a novel, I often haven't read the novel... .
– John Hurt
My voice has been blamed on Guinness and on Gauloises and all sorts of things like that but I'm here to tell you that it's a family voice entirely. My voice is the same timbre as my brothers, except of course that he's more Cambridge, and my father had exactly the same voice only he, of course, was a bit more North country. But the timbre of the voice is a family thing. I'm not being modest I'm being very grateful. I do love working vocally.
– John Hurt
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.
– John Hurt
Obviously, the arrogance of my own nature in regards to other people's work would suggest that I think I'm talented.
– John Hurt
Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.
– John Hurt
The drink was effecting me badly. I was feeling lousy especially in the morning. Now I have a much fuller time with people. The more you don't drink the more you find you can be high as a kite anyway. I had huge fun when I was drinking. But towards the end I was not genuinely enjoying it. I drank mainly for enthusiasm, to prolong the night and the laughter and the conversation.
– John Hurt
What's the difference, actually, between believing in a God on one side or the other, Catholic or Protestant? It's all the same if you accept it. Much of our morality is based on things completely outmoded. But people are wonderful. There's no harm in them, they're not the problem. It's governments and politics that make wars and do stupid things, and they should be attended to. There's no security in this life.
– John Hurt
When you're really working well with a director then you can be as outrageous as you like and so can he. And there's no worry about it.
– John Hurt
You've got to shout to make yourself heard in this business. It's unfortunate, but true-if you don't spell everything out in your contract, you've got only yourself to blame for the treatment you get. Otherwise, whether it's having a caravan-a dressing-room trailer-on the set each day, or whatever it is, you don't get it.
– John Hurt