Al Pacino Quotes
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There are people whose sense of reality is very strong, who have a sense of honesty. Lee Strasberg is like that, my grandfather was like that. These are the kinds of men I've had close relationships with.
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Love is overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate.
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It wasn't until I got older that I realized acting was something I could really do.
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Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions. And then you go back like a few days later and then you listen to the movie. And it sort of plays in your mind like a film, like a first rough cut of a movie.
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My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.
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I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
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If you have the opportunity to meet someone as an actor, it's just great fodder for you. It's wonderful source stuff that we die for.
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All due respect, and trying to be as modest as I can be: I am a dancer.
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I've never cared for guns. In fact, when I did 'Scent of a Woman' I had to learn how to assemble one.
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It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.
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[Ocean's Thirteen] is a great group, and it was an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh. But mainly? It was shot in L.A. and I want to be next to my kids. So I've been doing everything that has to do with being next to them, close to them.
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The fruit falls off the tree. You don't shake it off before it's ready to fall.
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Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
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In America most everybody who's Italian is half Italian. Except me. I'm all Italian. I'm mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.
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My movies are always being played on television, I'm very well known and all that stuff - I go all over the world, I have access to many things, many people, many places and it's wonderful. But now I'm at a point where...I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.
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I'm always on a red carpet . . . the other day I thought, this ain't bad. You can meet people on it.
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When you perform with a live audience, the audience comes back to you, so that you and the audience are giving to each other, in a sense. It's an extraordinary thing. It's wild turf up there.
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I haven't encouraged [Julia Marie Pacino] or discouraged her. I let her go her own way. I did say to her that I thought that she had a real gift, and it's a good idea to know that. It's always good to go with your gift.
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If you can identify with people, you can empathize with people and therefore you understand things.
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I'm an actor, not a star. Stars are people who live in Hollywood and have heart-shaped swimming pools.
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I didn't want the book [of memoirs] out, naturally - Larry [Grobel] knew that for 20 years, 15 at least, I didn't want anything written about me. Then, you know, things happen, finally it's OK and I trust Larry. Nothing about it is salacious in any way.
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Vanity: my favorite sin.
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It's easy to fool the eye but it's hard to fool the heart.
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The reasons you have for doing a movie will vary with the way your life is going. There was a time when a made a some movies because I felt I needed to work. And I didn't think about the material as much. But sometimes I've thought about the material a lot and thought I was doing the right thing, and it didn't work out.