Dustin Hoffman Quotes
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So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
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There's too many interesting women I have…not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.
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Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.
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And that's another reason to make this movie: We can put plays on film now, at a relatively small cost, and they will reach an audience they would never have reached otherwise.
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Somehow I think it was declared very early on that I was the - if not the black sheep of the family, not a very good student.
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A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
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Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney met Ron Harwood on the dresser, so that's how it started. It's a wonderful documentary. It's called Tosca's Kiss and Mr Hardwood told me about it when I asked him what the genesis was. It was made in 1983 and Verdi, who was rich and successful, toward the end of his life decided to build a mansion for himself in Milan, where he lived, and he stipulated that when he died opera singers and musicians - because he knew so many who were no longer playing at the Scala and some were poor - could live there.
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I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but not hell.
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There is something unnatural about marriage. These two people are not going to be the same people in a few years. The trick is to live your own life while sharing the same space.
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Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.
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I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life.
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One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you're a star you're dead already. You're embalmed.
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This is not a movie about smelling the urine! It's another kind of movie." Volker Schlöndorff got Billy Wilder to agree to these conversations - you can buy it - because Volker spoke German at times. And he said to Billy Wilder: "What is in your mind?" And he said: "If you're going to try to tell the truth to the audience, you'd better be funny or they'll kill you." And I haven't forgotten that.
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I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.
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I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in.
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We all believe what we read. I read how Tom Cruise and I were two big egos holding up shooting. I know that isn't true - but if I wasn't making a movie with him and I just picked up the paper, I'd believe it. That's interesting, isn't it?
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For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible.
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You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.
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I wanted to be a jazz pianist, but I wasn't good enough. I got into city college because I didn't have the grades to get into university. I took acting because it was a way to get three credits. I just needed three credits and my friend told me to take acting because it was like gym - nobody fails you. I took it and that's literally how I got involved in acting.
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I think 'retirement' goes hand in hand with people who make a living by having a 'job.' I don't think we-the .00001 percent of the population who are so fortunate to love passionately what we do-consider it a 'job.
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I wanted to find my limitations so I decided to do Shylock. And if I fail? I've never been afraid of that. I have other fears - doing bad work knowingly is the worst fear.
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Movies are always in a state of locomotion. You start with a general idea of how it should feel and then you find you've got a runaway train. You have to race to catch up: the movie is telling you what it wants to become, and when that happens there's no greater feeling.
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Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me... aren't you?
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I'd like to thank my parents for not practicing birth control.