Quotes by Laurence Olivier

• My stage successes have provided me with the greatest moments outside myself, my film successes the best moments, professionally, within myself.
• When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part.
• We have all, at one time or another, been performers, and many of us still are - politicians, playboys, cardinals and kings.
• We ape, we mimic, we mock. We act.
• The office of drama is to exercise, possibly to exhaust, human emotions. The purpose of comedy is to tickle those emotions into an expression of light relief; of tragedy, to wound them and bring the relief of tears. Disgust and terror are the other points of the compass.
• Surely we have always acted; it is an instinct inherent in all of us. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all do it.
• Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms. I said that some time ago, and today I do not think I would add one word.
• Lead the audience by the nose to the thought.
• I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor-to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.
• Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
• The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.
• I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.
• If he was lost for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey.
• I often think that could we creep behind the actor's eyes, we would find an attic of forgotten toys and a copy of the Domesday Book.
• I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.
• I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on with it.
• I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
• Have a very good reason for everything you do.