Quotes by Bela Lugosi

• You can't make people believe in you if you play a horror part with your tongue in your cheek.
• Women have a predestination to suffering.
• Without movie parts I was reduced to freak status. I just couldn't stand it.
• When a film company is in the red they come to me. Always it is the same.
• There was no male vampire type in existence. Someone suggested an actor of the Continental School who could play any type, and mentioned me.
• To portray a maniac offers a compelling challenge.
• I have lived too completely, I think. I have known every human emotion.
• To win a woman, take her with you to see Dracula.
• I've been using narcotics for 20 years.
• I'll take any story if it's good.
• I'll be truthful. The weekly paycheck is the most important thing to me.
• I'd like to quit the supernatural roles and play just an interesting, down-to-earth person.
• I studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts for four years and emerged with a degree.
• I never play without my cape.
• I look in the mirror and say to myself, Can it be you once played Romeo?
• If you are not serious, people will sense it.
• I have never met a vampire personally, but I don't know what might happen tomorrow.
• In Hungary acting is a profession. In America it is a decision.
• I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all, but, to tell you the truth, I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.
• I enjoy my work. I haven't been an actor for 30 years without getting pleasure out of the profession.
• I don't have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.
• Every actor is somewhat mad, or else he'd be a plumber or a bookkeeper or a salesman.
• Death, the final, triumphant lover.
• Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.
• Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.
• Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.
• A screen actor is compensated in the knowledge that millions will see his performance at one time, where only hundreds will see it on the stage.
• I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.
• My close-up was magnificent!
• The stage is near and dear to me.
• The screen magnifies everything, even the way you are thinking.
• The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.
• The love-bite, it is the beginning. You will be irresistible.
• The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.
• The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner.
• If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.
• Of all the roles I've done on the stage, I'm partial to Cyrano de Bergerac.
• The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success.
• My body grew hot, then cold. I tried to eat the bed sheets. My heart beat madly. Every joint in my body ached. When I took the cure they took it all away from me.
• Martyrdom was the price of enthusiasm for acting.
• It was hell to go through what I went through. I didn't know I had so many friends. Many people gave a damn about my situation. They helped cure me.
• It took several years of hard work in small roles before I attained stardom.
• It took me years to live down Dracula and convince the film producers that I would play almost any other type of role.
• It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more.
• It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.
• In the studio the director controls the actor's every move, every inflection, every expression.
• In making theories, always keep a window open so that you can throw one out if necessary.
• In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.
• People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties... they live like ants.