20 Paul Scofield Quotes

Paul Scofield quotes

1. If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr? If you have always been that, then why lose your title? I have a title, which is the same one that I have always had. But it's not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully.

2. I found at this point that effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do, that I didn't want to make effects, that I wanted, as it were, to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.

3. King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.

4. As an actor I don't admit to any limitations. In rehearsal one comes up against apparently insuperable barriers, but if one can imaginatively get past them, overreach one's natural reach, it is astonishing how elastic one can become. I've got to go not so far as I can, but as far as is needed. It's up to somebody else to say if I've made a fool of myself.

5. Oh, I suppose my wife and I will open a bottle of champagne with another couple.

6. I decided a long time ago I didn't want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don't think it's a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.

7. As you get older, the more you know, so the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger.

8. It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.

9. Privacy is not negotiable.

10. I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered early in my life, practically when I was a child, that I could do something that in the end I finally wanted to do all my life. It has something to do with being completely removed from oneself, which doesn't necessarily mean one is uncomfortable inside oneself. It just means it's a great relief to be inhabiting somebody else. It can be a tremendously liberating sensation.

11. Beneath the gentle modesty of his behavior lay the absolute assurance of a born artist.

12. He brought you face to face with the unfathomable. No actor summoned with such authority the mysterious depths of human experience.

13. The only great actor I have worked with who was not in any sense a star - there was no great publicity about him, no scandal about him, none of the attitude to stardom.

1. What these books have conclusively proven is that the diffence between men and women is exactly 38 pages.

2. Sixty-four thousand dollars for a question, I hope they are asking you the meaning of life.

3. I should in fairness add that my taste in music is reputedly deplorable.

4. A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter.

5. Cheating on a quiz show? That's sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.

6. The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor.

7. A painting means as much to you as a string of pearls to an ape.