"A journalist's lasso... the guy who plays villains." - Alan Rickman
"Acting - it's a question of watch and learn-fast." - Alan Rickman
"Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent." - Alan Rickman
"Acting is not something I'll stop doing. I can't see how. You're always reacting as well as performing." - Alan Rickman
"Acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over." - Alan Rickman
"All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening." - Alan Rickman
"An actor has to protect himself a bit. And yet be very open. To be both fit and open is a hard balance to achieve." - Alan Rickman
"An actor likes to be treated in a certain way, to work in a certain manner." - Alan Rickman
"As a writer you are involved in a much more mysterious process. An actor or director is an interpreter." - Alan Rickman
"As we get older, we are all waiting on the shore. It's the young who walk out into the world we have made for them." - Alan Rickman
"At least I'm not being stoned in the street here for having dared to try." - Alan Rickman
"At Stratford-Upon-Avon you learned how to bark at 1,500 people." - Alan Rickman
"Certain features, that if they're lit from certain angles-it's out of story books, it's out of The Wizard of Oz." - Alan Rickman
"Certain things that one does get more focus than others." - Alan Rickman
"Coming back to do a play at a Scottish festival must seem very perverse. Even I thought I was mad." - Alan Rickman
"Directing takes such a big lump out of your life." - Alan Rickman
"Each character I play has different dimensions. I'm not interested in words that pull them together." - Alan Rickman
"Hans, my Die Hard character, is a really good part; bad guys are fun to play, although I don't want to make a habit of it." - Alan Rickman
"I am hellbent on defying your expectations, at every turn, and even if you don't like what's being done, I dare you to find it uninteresting." - Alan Rickman
"I am the character you are not supposed to like." - Alan Rickman
"I came off a huge-budgeted Hollywood movie and went to a place where you could hear yourself think." - Alan Rickman
"I can't answer for what the director or the studio do." - Alan Rickman
"I cannot take responsibility for people's fantasy. I can't think about it, I can't live with it and I won't dwell on it." - Alan Rickman
"I couldn't have done the film without computer graphics." - Alan Rickman
"I do feel more myself in America. I can regress there, and they have roller-coaster parks." - Alan Rickman
"I don't eat the right food, I'm not a monk, and I'm very gregarious. But I'm not stupid." - Alan Rickman
"I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next half hour." - Alan Rickman
"I don't mind seducing as long as at the end of the seduction there's an idea or a shock." - Alan Rickman
"I don't think acting is about competition. I'm glad if people like one's work, but why turn it into something else?" - Alan Rickman
"I don't think it's right that everybody knows everything about me." - Alan Rickman
"I don't want to drag anybody anywhere. But where were you born?" - Alan Rickman
"I drive a car in L.A., and I don't here. I feel more in charge of myself." - Alan Rickman
"I find myself becoming less and less enamoured of public statement-I'd rather see it in action." - Alan Rickman
"I flew to New York for a preview and the audience just sttod up and cheered and threw things at the screen." - Alan Rickman
"I found the actual work of directing had very little to do with going up to actors and saying things." - Alan Rickman
"I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: You're going to forget your lines." - Alan Rickman
"I have absolutely no time for margaret Thatcher's England. I think she is a narrowwing pernicious influence." - Alan Rickman
"I have this feeling that if I could sort out what's on my dining room table, everything would fall into place." - Alan Rickman
"I hope the audience will see the play as more than just applicable to actors. It's also about lying, and how close acting is to madness." - Alan Rickman
"I just want bigger challenges, to touch that unknown part where you're not just a collection of other people's preconceptions." - Alan Rickman
"I know that we would not be sitting here doing this without Hollywood. It's Hollywood which puts you on the bigger map." - Alan Rickman
"I love to travel and I don't have children, so there is a certain freedom." - Alan Rickman
"I might very well break the picture by playing it so-well, so grand-manner." - Alan Rickman
"I need time to go home and find out who I am." - Alan Rickman
"I only saw Magnolia recently, and thought it was just brilliant." - Alan Rickman
"I think it's a disgrace that English actors get taken advantage of. It's very different here." - Alan Rickman
"I think that true creativity is also linked to discipline. Even if it's just a budget nailing you down, it helps creativity." - Alan Rickman
"I think there's some connection between absolute discipline and absolute freedom." - Alan Rickman
"I think worrying things are going on in England-a real apathy." - Alan Rickman
"I thought it was interesting that the audiences hated the Marquise and let the Vicomte off the hook. People still allow Valmonts in this world." - Alan Rickman
"I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure." - Alan Rickman
"I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking, This is exciting." - Alan Rickman
"I was always used to seeing my mother in the brightest of colours." - Alan Rickman
"I was just relieved to get from one end of the play to the other. It is ludicrous in having four soliloques coming one after another." - Alan Rickman
"I was playing somebody who was basically an alcoholic. And I think people got very upset that they weren't seeing a great hero." - Alan Rickman
"I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do, and just in time. In acting, you can't hang about too long." - Alan Rickman
"I went straight from filming Mesmer, which was difficult, to doing Mike Newell's An Awfully Big Adventure which was a breeze." - Alan Rickman
"I wouldn't dream of being out there as an actor looking for work." - Alan Rickman
"I'd been doing some amateur theater. Our design group was very successful, but I could also see that it was just going to repeat itself." - Alan Rickman
"I'm a Piscean. In every area of my life complete opposites are at work all the time." - Alan Rickman
"I'm a quite serious actor who doesn't mind being ridiculously comic." - Alan Rickman
"I'm always aware of the camera and it feels like that's the audience." - Alan Rickman
"I'm as neurotic as the next person when it comes to being asked constantly to produce qualities which actuallly have nothing to do with you." - Alan Rickman
"I'm aware of lots of cross currents rather than separating things out." - Alan Rickman
"I'm playing an angel in Kevin Smith's new film, Dogma, so there's a lot of wings sprouting out of people's backs." - Alan Rickman
"I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yoghurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola." - Alan Rickman
"I've had to guide my career and seize any opportunity that came my way." - Alan Rickman
"I've never been able to plan my life. I just lurch from indecision to indecision." - Alan Rickman
"If a camera is placed endlessly on the floor in all your shots, and looks up your nostrils-you know, it's not just me." - Alan Rickman
"If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust." - Alan Rickman
"If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work." - Alan Rickman
"If you could build a house on a trampoline, that would suit me fine." - Alan Rickman
"If you have your eye trained, it affects what you do in a rehearsal room or on stage in terms of its space and a sense of texture and colour." - Alan Rickman
"If you look at the movies that I've done, it's like three good guys to three bad guys-and one unnameable." - Alan Rickman
"If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation." - Alan Rickman
"In England, we have these things called football hooligans, and I think that's slightly what I'm seeing." - Alan Rickman
"It never felt like a sudden switch to me. The curse of our times is that you are supposed to decide your life at 16 and stick to that." - Alan Rickman
"It was a great experience, and sometimes it was just awful. But I imagine that's true of any film. You can't predict what it's going to be like." - Alan Rickman
"It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising." - Alan Rickman
"It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in. There's a horrible inexcapability to it." - Alan Rickman
"It's all air and water in my chart. Nothing to hold me down. Luckily, there is some fire there. That must be from my mum-she was a Sagittarian." - Alan Rickman
"It's also a curious thing to be doing because I haven't been on stage for four years." - Alan Rickman
"It's disgusting and wonderful. Like going to Dunkin' Donuts for lunch every day." - Alan Rickman
"It's just a life on the move, really, and that's the way I prefer it. I like to present a moving target." - Alan Rickman
"Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There's a great deal of wonderful energy there." - Alan Rickman
"Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made." - Alan Rickman
"Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive." - Alan Rickman
"Maybe you'd get hurt by criticism, I don't know. Perhaps everybody does; I don't think anybody reaches a point where you're inured to it." - Alan Rickman
"Mesmer has been seen at the Montreal and Vienna Film Festivals and was invited to the New York Film Festival, but wasn't allowed to go." - Alan Rickman
"Most of our lives, we function with a big divide between here and here." - Alan Rickman
"Most of the 14 films I've done, however, have been independents shot in Europe and Great Britain." - Alan Rickman
"My blood is awash with Welsh and Irishness which probably explains a lot about a lot. What I hope it means is being not closed." - Alan Rickman
"My first major part was in his adaptation of Jonson's The Devil is an Ass and I've worked with him four or five times since." - Alan Rickman
"My friend Bob Hoskins says filmmaking is like being pecked to death by pigeons. I would use a more violent bird." - Alan Rickman
"My girlfriend is the ultimate leveler. When I whine about my work, she'll fire back at me some well-aimed sentence about the homeless." - Alan Rickman
"My idea of a real treat is Magic Mountain without standing in line." - Alan Rickman
"My life became a cartoon. I'd just finished on Broadway doing this tough play, and suddenly I moved from the dark into the neon light." - Alan Rickman
"My mother was widowed young-I was the second of four children and she raised us on her own." - Alan Rickman
"My parents certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident." - Alan Rickman
"My whole life's been lived in west London-born, schooled, art-schooled, drama-schooled." - Alan Rickman
"Nothing gives me as much pleasure as travelling. I love getting on trains and boats and planes." - Alan Rickman
"Nothing is like anything else and I'm not thinking of anything else I've done, just the job in hand." - Alan Rickman
"Oh, yeah, I'm angry. I'm passionately angry at this country. Twelve years of a Tory government has left the theater in tatters." - Alan Rickman
"On film you put all your energies into a single glance." - Alan Rickman
"On film you're perhaps spending most of the time waiting to work and so you've got to keep that energy release in check... but not let it go to sleep." - Alan Rickman
"One longs for a director with a sense of imagination." - Alan Rickman
"One of the concerns I had... was a culture which puts its actors on pedestals." - Alan Rickman
"One of the pleasures of filmmaking is the cushion of support that inflates around you, and you really feel it as the weeks go on." - Alan Rickman
"People don't think they need to do rep; they think you can come out and be a star overnight, like the Brit pack." - Alan Rickman
"Probably to some extent, one's aware of moments when you have stamped your little foot in a childish way." - Alan Rickman
"Robin's Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right-but goodness, this is a costume melodrama, not Shakespeare." - Alan Rickman
"Since I'd been doing a play for two years, I didn't want to get on a stage again; I needed some kind of explosion to take it away." - Alan Rickman
"So much newsprint is devoted to the lives and opinions of actors. I'm still really unsure about how much of that is relevant." - Alan Rickman
"Some actors have opportunities and shapes given to them. Not me." - Alan Rickman
"Some things I'm offered in the States, I can't actually see why anyone's bothering except for the pay cheque. You read the script and think, Why?" - Alan Rickman
"Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch." - Alan Rickman
"Sometimes I think that in an ideal world, three children, aged 12, 10, and 8, would be dropped on us and we would be great parents for that family." - Alan Rickman
"Sometimes you see a film and make a mental note that you want to work with that particular director." - Alan Rickman
"Susan Sarandon said a wonderful thing to me once: Don't think about it too much; that was my mistake." - Alan Rickman
"Talent is an accident of genes-and a responsibility." - Alan Rickman
"The aim is never to generalize. That's your job. It's about seeing in three dimensions as much as possible." - Alan Rickman
"The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial." - Alan Rickman
"The best creative talents have gone to the ad agencies... recent times have been terrible, terrible years for the cultural life of this country." - Alan Rickman
"The greatest thing is to be able to do something out of the blue that you couldn't have predicted and is free of any preconceptions." - Alan Rickman
"The imagination has a whole load of ideas and the equipment seems to be less and less capable of matching the imagination!" - Alan Rickman
"The main trouble is that as an actor you've got too many memories of horrible rehearsals." - Alan Rickman
"The memories I have of my father are those you have as an 8-year-old. Yes, his death was a huge thing to happen to four kids under 10." - Alan Rickman
"The nights when you're feeling free in the wings and you go out there, then suddenly something tightens up." - Alan Rickman
"The play is as seductive as any of its characters." - Alan Rickman
"The play makes the rules. This play is about couples who swim in and out of focus." - Alan Rickman
"The three bad guys I've done have been in big, Hollywood expensive things, and the good guys are in small movies-small budgets, at least." - Alan Rickman
"The whole business of laying yourself on the line is difficult whatever the character. It's my life as well as my work." - Alan Rickman
"The whole essence of Valmont was surface: dirt under polished fingernails." - Alan Rickman
"There are a lot of gremlins out there for both of us." - Alan Rickman
"There are little messages going on inside you all the time. Little hands are going up inside you, saying, Excuse me!" - Alan Rickman
"There are particular muscles which go flabby if you don't use them." - Alan Rickman
"There can be a huge buzz in acting but the thing is... the moments are frequently followed by a very swift kick in the guts or smack to the head." - Alan Rickman
"There was an inevitability about my being an actor since about the age of 7, but there were other roads that had to be traveled first." - Alan Rickman
"There we were, hardly taking off any clothes, and, as a friend put it, there wasn't a dry seat in the house." - Alan Rickman
"There you are, 15 feet across the screen, and people can visit all sorts of fantasies on your face that are nothing to do with you." - Alan Rickman
"There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do." - Alan Rickman
"There's no master plan. It's not calculated. Every choice is taken on its own terms." - Alan Rickman
"This torn cartilage is my souvenir of Hollywood." - Alan Rickman
"To come to film too prepared could be a problem as well. Too unwilling to throw it away and do something else." - Alan Rickman
"To work with Ninagawa is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just one question. Are we supposed to like those young people?" - Alan Rickman
"Unfortunately a lot of this film industry arguing is not about films but about the size of people's willies." - Alan Rickman
"Valmont had such a complicated psyche, you couldn't say that about Hans Gruber." - Alan Rickman
"We all say lots of stupid things that, you know, you wish you could take back." - Alan Rickman
"What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves." - Alan Rickman
"What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing." - Alan Rickman
"When I get off the plane in England I always feel about two inches shorter." - Alan Rickman
"When the film ends, the conversation begins with the audience, and that's a new one every night it plays." - Alan Rickman
"When you come off the stage, you want to walk out into life." - Alan Rickman
"Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play." - Alan Rickman
"You are given this thing and everybody has talent... mine just happens to be for acting and that creates a situation like this." - Alan Rickman
"You can lull the paying customers as long as they get slapped." - Alan Rickman
"You can never predict what you're going to say yes and no to 'cause it'll probably depend on what you just did." - Alan Rickman
"You can't be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and a lot of bloody hard work." - Alan Rickman
"You can't judge your characters; that's the last thing you can ever do. You've got to go in there informed, but innocent." - Alan Rickman
"You don't always look ahead, but you turn equally to the past. I think of that more and more." - Alan Rickman
"You don't always want to do the same thing again. A life of endless repetition wouldn't make sense at any level." - Alan Rickman
"You either want to say those lines, or you don't." - Alan Rickman
"You interrupt your instincts by explaining. I took one look at Stanislavsky and closed the book very quickly." - Alan Rickman
"You only speak as a human being in life and, therefore, you're trying to reproduce life onstage." - Alan Rickman
"You start to notice that if you get into a limousine, it's only there for as long as you're selling the movie." - Alan Rickman
"You watch yourself doing things because you have set in motion events which will change your life." - Alan Rickman
"You're there with these characters looking at life through generations." - Alan Rickman
"You're too busy sensing other people's fear rather than your own." - Alan Rickman
