David Suchet Quotes

If you ask me about Napoleon, I'll tell you about his relationship with sugar. And canning - thanks to Napoleon, we have canning.

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

[Of Napoleon BonaparteII:] His mind was a kind of extinct sulfur pit.

Napoleon was one of the most complex personalities in history.He was ruthless, small in stature, a bully, vulnerable, unfaithful and I think he was the first person to shoot prisoners of war so that he had food for his own army. He was absolutely single-minded but he also obviously had charm. How else could a man like him have come back as he did and have the nation rise to a man!

How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I never thought that I would have to play an Indian, well half French, but an Indian woman in my life.

So you can't judge the character you're playing ever.

Napoleon the Third was not much. He died in England, and was buried in a country church-yard much the same as Kiltartan. But Napoleon the First was a great man; it was given out of him there never would be so great a man again.

I think that the most important thing for me is, how is the character that I would be reading for? Is it interesting? Is there stuff to do? Are there things that you can do with the character? How can you play it out? Just those kinds of things that are very important for an actor. Also, a good director and good dialogue.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

Napoleon—mighty somnambulist of a vanished dream.

[Writing about Napoleon Bonaparte:] That infernal creature who is the curse of the human race becomes every day more and more abominable.

A part of my job, when I'm playing a character and approaching a role, is to rationalize and to not judge whatsoever.

Occasionally, I've been asked to do American roles, and once or twice I have, but I don't understand Americans. I don't have any real feeling for American culture.

I will always find a defense for characters, and that's why it's fun playing characters that are morally ambiguous, or are at least perceived superficially as being problematic.

It's great to be able to play the 'bad guy' role, because you always get a lot to do, but I'm always looking at the why - how does a person get to that particular point.

Any decent actor knows you can't judge the character you're playing.

With any role I play, I find out what the human problem is first.

Everyone has a different interpretation of characters we know and love from Shakespeare, from 'Miller'. There's specific things about them that are written that are kind of the fingerprints of the first person who played that role, and so I like to think of it as a road map.

Every character I play is me.

I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.

A lot of the characters I play on Japanese shows are actually acted in Japan by women. I don't know what that says about me.

As an actor, I'm more interested in characters the longer I have lived with them.

[On Napoleon:] One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one's ears when one is near that man.