Laurence Olivier

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.

If he was lost for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey.

I believe in the theater I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.

We have all, at one time or another, been performers, and many of us still are - politicians, playboys, cardinals and kings.

My dear boy, why don't you try acting (on the set of 'Marathon Man', to Dustin Hoffman, who had announced that he'd gone 3 days without sleep in order to 'become' his character

It's just like a nursery game of make-believe.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real.

If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life- it's an exhalation of life and I think I you probably need a little touch of madness.

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.

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.

I'm rather bored by the subject -- meaning me. It's a sort of a yoke, but at times you know, a yoke is a kind of comfort. And it's always there.