William Hurt Quotes

Being a father, being a friend, those are the things that make me feel successful.

The perfection in theater is that it's over the second it's done

The Alexander Technique has helped me to undo knots, unblock energy and deal with almost paralysing stage fright

I've been delighted by Cannes and Toronto but I keep saying I don't know how good we're going to be received in America because that's where it's most challenging

Heroes to me are guys that sit in libraries. They absorb knowledge and then the risks they take are calculated on the basis of the courage it took to become replete with knowledge.

The greatest single human gift is the ability to chase down our dreams.

What's really frustrating with movies is the lack of improvement.

I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either.

It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.

People who have expertise or the luck to have rehearsal time with cameras have it over people who don't.

But I am not going to live for ever. And the more I know it, the more amazed I am by being here at all.

If you're lucky, and not a lot of actors are these days, you get the chance to create a character

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

I very much prefer the balance in a scene to standing out and so you have to make a decision

Also CSPAN is really the great treasure of the media as far as getting information.

You don't look at it as the size of the role. Quantity is not the point. You can be as thorough in 30 seconds as you can in three hours.

It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.

All I know is that my best work has come out of being committed and happy.

I know what I love about acting - and it's the creative process

You have to create a track record of breaking your own mold, or at least other people's idea of that mold.

Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study.

I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily.

I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people

I have a film I want to direct. Gena Rowlands was going to do it with me a long time ago. It's about an older woman who's running a ranch in the west the old fashioned way.

Being famous is not something that would make me feel successful - unless one was striving for mediocrity.

I listen to XM radio because I can get so many overseas news stations.

The amount of financial and imaginative energy that's put into mediocrity is just amazing, which I find to be fundamentally offensive as a human being.

But it's also another myth to think that you should be as tight as a drum and not have any frailties or fragilities.

And I don't want to use my troubles as an example of what to do and what not to do.

I just looked at him because I want to be looking in someone's eyes when I die.

I need six weeks of rehearsal and women need nine months and it took me 15 years to figure that out

Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure

I am so thrilled by the privilege of life, and yet at the same time I know that I have to let it go.

The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.

I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.

The problem with Google is you have 360 degrees of omnidirectional information on a linear basis, but the algorithms for irony and ambiguity are not there. And those are the algorithms of wisdom.

The achievement is appreciation. Your ability to be surprised and awed by beauty!

Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure.