John Hurt Quotes

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

I don't mind doing the green-screen stuff at all, and in fact it's a lot like black-box theater, which I did plenty of in New York.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

There are, it seems, two muses: The Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

When preparing for a role, a month is a luxury. Sometimes you've maybe got two weeks before you start on something. So you have to learn how to do it quickly. And the longer you have a role, that it lives in your imagination, the more you're going to be able to contribute when you get on set. Because it's really about your subconscious having time to sit with the part, so you're out doing something and then something occurs to you, you know?

A lot of my sketches came from thoughts, and I always just wanted to act them out.

The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

Painting is a magical process that I like, where you conjure something out of nothing; you get a little idea that leads you through ... You can go into a trance while you're doing it, so it's a nice contrast to real life.

I'd basically have trouble with any job that doesn't require me to wear silly clothes and talk in funny voices.

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you.

Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it.

The most important thing is to keep creating and following my inklings as they come into being and acting on them.

As an actor I suppose you're constantly observing. I don't sit in restaurants making notes, I don't live my life in order to then feed it into my work.

[As an actor] I have ideas, but things should always be fluid. You should always be ready to follow an instinct. Something might reveal itself on the day.

The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

Acting's entertainment. It's not brain surgery.

As an actor, you deal in fantasy, imagination, and concentration. Those are your three weapons. Those are your bullets.

Going into editing when I got to New York was part of that. I guess I just kind of wanted to know as much as possible. But I have a real love of the whole process, from start to finish. So right now, I fit into the acting part of the process, but I wouldn't rule anything out. I'm enamored with how the whole thing works.

Working with talented people and challenging myself as an actor [excites me].

I have been doodling with ink and watercolor on paper all my life. It's my way of stirring up my imagination to see what I find hidden in my head. I call the results dream pictures, fantasy sketches, and even brain-sharpenin g exercises.

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

Everything stems from real experiences but I do also have a very vivid imagination. A song lyric gets easily carried away with itself and can end up somewhere I'd never have predicted.