Val Kilmer Quotes

You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

When I started in the theater, I'd do plays by Shakespeare or Ibsen or Chekhov, and they all created great women's roles.

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.

I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

I am grateful to theatre for making me what I am today. But it's not like theatre is my first love. I am equally attached to cinema, which is, actually, a child of theatre, since it borrows heavily from it.

Discovering Samuel Beckett in college was a big deal for me. I realized you could be very funny and very dark at the same time.

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

I'd never done any Beckett before 'Krapp,' and I haven't done any of his other plays since. I've always felt that 'Krapp' is an autobiographical piece.

Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

As a student in London, I had seen so many shows, so many plays and had seen so many greats of the day.

I went to drama school for three years, and the whole thing there is that hopefully you are introduced to a man called William Shakespeare who is the greatest of all time of all storytelling.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.

Doing Shakespeare on stage with Kenneth Branagh, I don't think it gets better than that.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

The camera lens or the television camera is still just a proscenium arch. And as a great old character actor once said to me, wherever you're acting, you reach up and take hold of the proscenium arch, and you pull it down around your shoulders.

I'd like to do plays, maybe a one man show.

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.

I'm constantly involved in theater, looking at theater, trying to do work in theater, support theater. And that's kind of my creative passion.

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.'

All theatre is absurd.