“The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.”

You can’t make people believe in you if you play a horror part with your tongue in your cheek.

The love-bite, it is the beginning. You will be irresistible.

That is different, to have someone think that I am evil when I really am not.

I don’t have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.

Death, the final, triumphant lover.

I have lived too completely. I think I have known every human emotion.

When a film company is in the red they come to me. Always it is the same.

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.

It took me years to live down Dracula and convince the film producers that I would play almost any other type of role.

Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.

In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.

I’d like to quit the supernatural roles and play just an interesting, down-to-earth person.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

The main thing that I learned from my horrible job experiences was how horrible they were.

I mean, it’s hard to talk about death without realizing that’s our end too, right? I am constantly aware of death.

As I said in my last book, birds are mean. They’re the only pet that, when they escape, the owners are relieved. You can tell a species is evil by doing this simple math.

A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem, it’s a predicament. That means it’s something that must be coped with, endured.

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.

It’s not that I want to be, but it’s a fascination of the mind and it plays a role in why I want to live my life a certain way.

I’m always telling my students that the weirdest thing is the truth. I mean, the fact that we get up in the morning and put on clothes is weird.

… we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation….