Quotes by William Hurt

• I am so thrilled by the privilege of life, and yet at the same time I know that I have to let it go.
• All I know is that my best work has come out of being committed and happy.
• Being a father, being a friend, those are the things that make me feel successful.
• Being famous is not something that would make me feel successful - unless one was striving for mediocrity.
• 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.
• David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.
• I was a science fiction junkie for a long time.
• What's really frustrating with movies is the lack of improvement.
• The thing is David is also aware of everything and it's not like you're going somewhere the director is not.
• The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.
• The perfection in theater is that it's over the second it's done.
• Sometimes people call me a success for all the reasons that make me think I'm a failure.
• People who have expertise or the luck to have rehearsal time with cameras have it over people who don't.
• Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you're just trying to get in and you're given so little time to get in gently, but it's always hard.
• 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.
• It just seems like that because I do a lot of independent films that don't get to the mainstream.
• If you're lucky, and not a lot of actors are these days, you get the chance to create a character.
• Great risks come in long term, tremendously assiduous, very courageous study.
• I was held hostage and almost executed by a man who was robbing us in the middle of the night.
• 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.
• I want to prove a point. That point is, actors are artists, not narcissists necessarily.
• I very much prefer the balance in a scene to standing out and so you have to make a decision.
• I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people.
• I need six weeks of rehearsal and women need nine months and it took me 15 years to figure that out.
• I listen to XM radio because I can get so many overseas news stations.
• I know what I love about acting - and it's the creative process.
• I just looked at him because I want to be looking in someone's eyes when I die.
• 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.
• I demand minimal for paid rehearsal and not always six weeks either.
• The thing is, I don't believe in most of what's done. 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.
• 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.
• You have to create a track record of breaking your own mold, or at least other people's idea of that mold.