Failure’s relative. I’ve always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something’s not right about that. It’s how you treat failure, too.
AL PACINOEverything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would’ve wanted to play 10 years ago, I don’t want to play now.
More Al Pacino Quotes
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I used to think of myself as a comedian. I’ve always admired comedians.
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[Oscar Wilde’s Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that’s why I guess it’s semi-autobiographical.
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I’m so shy now I wear sunglasses everywhere I go.
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Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you’re going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.
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Whether he’s doing great acting or not, you’re seeing somebody who is in the tradition of a great actor.
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You’re in a conversation and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying – even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.
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Read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.
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It’s never really that much fun for me to do movies anyway, because you – you know, you have to get up very early in the morning and you have to go in and you spend a lot of time waiting around.
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I want to be a great actor someday, and I’ve decided there’s no use philosophizing; the only way is to work at my craft.
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Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.
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You’ve got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition’s an opportunity to have an audience.
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The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires.
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I want to be interesting in an interview just as much as I want to do well in a part.
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All I am is what I’m going after.
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It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.
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Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don’t believe me when I tell them. That’s how I saw myself, in comedy.
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It turned out that time doesn’t heal the wound , but in its so merciful way , blunts the edges ever so slightly
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My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman.
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I would come home and she would tell me about her life that day and all her problems and I remember saying to her, look, you really got me through this picture because I would shed everything when I came home.
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Anybody who cares about what he does takes risks.
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I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it’s probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.
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It was a way of escaping the responsibilty of what was happening.
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[Ocean’s Thirteen] is a great group, and it was an opportunity to work with Steven Soderbergh. But mainly? It was shot in L.A. and I want to be next to my kids.
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I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It’s almost like a painter having a model to become.
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Jamie Foxx does a good rendition of me. It’s a real gift, mimicry of that kind, the tonal thing. It’s sort of like having a talent for playing an instrument.
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There is only one way of surviving all the early heartbreaks in this business. You must have a sense of humor. And I think it also helps if you are a dreamer. I had my dreams all right. And that is something no one can ever take away.
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