Frank langella quotes

I'm a firm believer in absolute honesty.

But in order to be the thing you want to be, you have to work like a dog at the thing you love.

Where you are is where it's at.... Don't ever give up & don't ever give in.

It's a living, breathing thing, acting.

A five-year-old Chinese girl knows more about football than I do.

But I firmly believe that you can't be emotionally free until you are emotionally committed.

Sometimes you have to get out of your own way as an actor. Young actors tend to over prepare sometimes and over think it. And actually there is nothing wrong with walking on a set with an empty brain and then on action allowing your adrenaline and your trust in yourself to take over.

But when I was seven or eight, I did my first little piece of acting.

Getting old is not for sissies, kid.

Actors want to show off and dance in front of you and get your love, because they don't think they're worthy of it in any other way.

I always signed autographs when I could and always stayed and chatted with them when I could.

But I think one of the reasons I tend to stay in the water most of the time is I distrust the comfort.

The last few years have been pretty hectic.

It's interesting to fantasize having a man sink his teeth into your neck for sustenance, knowing that it isn't going to be terribly painful but rather very exciting

As a matter of fact, I rarely ever play myself.

We do most of what we do out of our sexual energy and our sexual needs.

There is a thing called the death wish, a literal thing. It doesn't mean you want to die. It just means however we're built, as we get into these years, some inner part of you does begin to accept the fact that you're heading towards the end, and there's a peace that comes with that.

At this point in my career, I can stand shoulder to shoulder with an actor my age who has chosen to do really awful things, and he will get a job over me.

I have a list a mile long of faults that sometimes bring me to my knees in self-hatred.

There are no taboos in bed, and there shouldn't be any taboos in bed.

All of our health is basically genetics.

Vampires are sexy to a woman perhaps because the fantasy is similar to that of the man on the white horse sweeping her off to paradise.

The only thing you have then to believe in is your craft.

And the test for any actor is whether you stay at the table or go away.

I grew up in a household where everybody lived at the top of his lungs.

You start acting in spite of your neuroses, not because of them.

You can only lead by example, and you can only say it might be better for you if. But nobody can do anything until they're ready to do it. So you can sit down with a strong-minded young man of 24, as my son was at a point, and say now listen, this, this, this, and this.

Revelations come when you're in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself

What helped me most were my failures and slumps - when I couldn't get work, people weren't interested in me or had written me off.

When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.

There is no right in acting.

I just always thought, I love acting and I love writing. And when I haven't got any more good breath and good energy, then I'll write.

Theres a great deal of attention paid and books written about this change of life in a woman, and really very little written about a mans change of life.

If you're lucky as you get older, you respect the craft and it becomes a skill.

There's nothing like the bravery and the strength and the extraordinary optimism of a five-year-old child in a cancer hospital, fighting to live. It's there inside the spirit.

I have always felt the basis of everything in life is sexual, and I will maintain that to my dying day

It's also easy to fall back into what's familiar, what feels safe, what you've done before.

You get kinder when you get into my age range. You think back to how really unkind you were, and how cynical you were and how you tossed things away and you tossed people away, and you didn't care because you were climbing some mountain that you thought you needed to be on top of.

There's a certain secret every actor must have in his work. If you reveal it, you're letting the audience in on the wrinkles and convolutions of your brain. All I want them to do is to see the effect.

However, I don't by any means suggest that I'm always playing myself.

My last kids were born when I was in my forties, so I still had little kids around me, which gave me the illusion of feeling younger.

Absolutely. I can produce. I can write. I can direct.

It's my job to try to communicate with as little showiness as possible. I was a really showy actor as a young man.

I would rather spend one night with Dracula dead than with my husband alive.

I'm hardly disinterested totally in my appearance

I just feel that no matter what comes in a career - and mine has been all over the map - you must stay at the table, pick up the cards you're dealt and play them.

I always choose to do the thing that scares me.

You can only lead by example.

Intelligence is enormously sexy.

Each of us needs something - food, liquor, pot, whatever - to help us survive. Dracula needs blood.

One of the safest places to be in the world is the stage.

I'd always felt a man should marry later in life.

I have a good friend who says, "We're all just dodging bullets." It seems to me the trick to living a good life is to try to move away from the gun you turn on yourself.

I had to face within myself all the things I didn't do and wasn't while I was wearing my own crown.

I will carry on acting as long as I have breath and as long as I have energy and as long as I can remember my lines. Those are the basic things you need to be an actor. I'll never retire unless something happens to me and I can't do it well. If I can't do it well I don't want to see the public to see me wasting away in front of them.

I watch actors destroy themselves by trying to get it right.

Physical qualities don't really matter much.

The best kind of kinky sex is to have kinky sex with your wife or husband, the person you love

I now want to be playing parts more interesting to me and more exciting to me.

Then, for a hot three or four weeks I wanted to be a concert pianist.

My body of work means nothing to me

When asked what it takes to succeed in the acting profession, Bette Davis would answer, "The courage to be hated."