Buster Keaton Quotes
Buster Keaton shares deadpan, clever observations that capture the humor of everyday mishaps.
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We used to get arrested every other week - that is, the old man would get arrested.
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The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises . . . the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.
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If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I'll jump out the window.
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Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?
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No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.
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Think slow, act fast.
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The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.
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A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.
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Because of the way I looked on the stage and screen, the public naturally assumed I felt hopeless and unloved in my personal life. Nothing could be farther from the fact. As long back as I can remember, I have considered myself a fabulously lucky man.
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I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.
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I gotta do some sad scenes. Why, I never tried to make anybody cry in my life! And I go 'round all the time dolled up in kippie clothes-wear everything but a corset! Can't stub my toe in this picture nor anything! Just imagine having to play-act all the time without ever getting hit with anything!
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I said, 'how am I gonna keep from flinching?' He said, 'Look away from me. When I say turn, it'll be there.' He put my head where my feet were!
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If they're going to like anything of mine, they'll like The General.
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In 1928, I made the worst mistake of my career. Against my better judgment I let Joe Schenck talk me into giving up my own studio to make pictures at the booming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot in Culver City . . . they were picking stories and material without consulting me and I couldn't argue 'em out of it. I'd only argue about so far and then let it go. They'd say, 'This is funny,' and I'd say, 'It stinks.' It didn't make any difference. We did it anyhow.
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Schenck was supposed to be my producer but he never knew when or what I was shooting. He just turned me loose.
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The camera can't catch my blushes!
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The moment you give me a locomotive and things like that to play with, as a rule I find some way of getting laughs with it.
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Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.
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He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply 'silent' of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler's effortless, uninterested face.
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No other comedian could do as much with the dead-pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track's end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood.
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Perhaps because 'dry' comedy is so much more rare and odd than 'dry' wit, there are people that never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.
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The older Keaton got, the more one could see eternity in his look.
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The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw him. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn't believe the man's grace.
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I could tell you that those wonderful stories were 90% Buster's... I was often ashamed to take the money, much less the credit.
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What a creative genius - what an inventor... A guy like that, you just sit back and say, okay, I'll never get there!
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I just want that one day, when I retire, that people still remember me like they remember Buster. I really want someone to respect me the way they respect Buster.
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Watch his beautiful, compact body as it pirouettes or pretzels in tortured permutations or, even more elegantly, stands in repose as everything goes crazy around it. Watch his mind as it contemplates a hostile universe whose violent whims Buster understands, withstands and, miraculously, tames. Watch his camera taking his picture (Keaton directed or supervised all his best films); it is as cool as the star it captured in its glass... The medium was still in its infancy; comics were pioneering the craft of making people laugh at moving images. Keaton, it turns out, knew it all - intuitively.
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There are moments in many of his movies that are just poetic... In doing silent movies, no one had done this yet!
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For me its Buster Keaton's face, with maybe his little hat on... It's being able to look into his eyes and see that sad face.
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He was doing stuff that was surreal.
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It's said that Chaplin wanted you to like him, but Keaton didn't care. I think he cared, but was too proud to ask.
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With his dark, sensitive looks, his face in repose evoking years of quiet contemplation, he resembled a mixture of Buddhist monk and fashion model. He offered the ideal face and acting style for motion pictures, proving less is more. He would become a master of knowing when to do nothing at all.
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Maybe the trouble is that modern comics strive too hard to be sophisticated and knowing. What we've lost over the years is innocence and, as Keaton and company prove, innocence is an integral part of comedy.
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Buster Keaton... will be around forever, because it's unlikely that human beings will ever go out-of-date the way special effects do. Keaton running and clambering onto a moving Civil War train in The General is infinitely more exciting than Christian Slater jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding locomotive in Broken Arrow because what Keaton does is real, and the camera captures and preserves his feats for posterity. In Broken Arrow we never see Slater (or the stuntman, for that matter) leaping from the helicopter to the train. Instead there are several cuts, and we must suspend our disbelief and assume that the feat has been accomplished. Which means that it's no feat at all.
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What Keaton did physically, is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts... The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail - if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death.
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Like everyone else, I like to be with a happy crowd.
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All my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, 'Look at the poor dope, wilya?
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And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it.
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I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.
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Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.
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I've had few dull moments [in my life] and not too many sad and defeated ones. In saying this I am by no means overlooking the rough and rocky years I've lived through. But I was not brought up thinking life would be easy. I always expected to work hard for my money and to get nothing I did not earn. And the bad years, it seems to me, were so few that only a dyed-in-the-wool grouch who enjoys feeling sorry for himself would complain.
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I don't feel qualified to talk about my work.
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Not long ago a friend asked me what was the greatest pleasure I got from spending my whole life as an actor. There have been so many that I had to think about that for a moment. Then I said, 'Like everyone else, I like to be with a happy crowd'.
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I'm so sorry I fell down.
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Life is too serious to do farce comedy.
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What really got my goat at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers who never wrote their own jokes.
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They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.
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Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased.
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Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.
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“I was standing on the deck looking down at a gang of stevedores working on the dock thirty feet below. One of them recognized me, nudged his neighbor, and pointed. All at once the whole gang stopped working to yell, 'Booster! Booster Keaton!' They waved in wild excitement, and I waved back, marveling, because it was fifteen years of more since they could have seen my last M-G-M picture. And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it. Dr. Avedon said I could live to be a hundred years old. I intend to do it. For who would not wish to live a hundred years in a world where there are so many people who remember with gratitude and affection a little man with a frozen face who made them laugh a bit long years ago when they and I were both young?”
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“I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do. Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers.”
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Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again