Top 55 Alan Rickman Quotes

I always feel that when I come to Edinburgh, in many ways I am coming home.

If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there’s only one topic of conversation.

I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.

One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.

From my experience, I think that every actor has to make sure that they’re in charge of their own career somehow or other.

Every so often you read a play and a character just speaks to you – almost seems to speak through you, in fact.

Film has to be reflecting the world that we live in, and that’s all you want to be a part of. Actors inhabit the same planet as everyone else. It’s a weird thing that happens when you’re an actor because people hold you up because you somehow embody in parts groups of people or people’s hopes or something.

Unless we tell stories about ourselves, which is all that theater is, we’re in deep trouble.

I have just returned from the dubbing studio where I spoke into a microphone as Severus Snape for absolutely the last time.

All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening.

I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It’s kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It’s a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.

Somebody with Debbie Reynolds’ features doesn’t get cast as the Wicked Witch.

I knew with Snape I was working as a double agent, as it turns out, and a very good one at that.

Maverick is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.

It is an ancient need to be told stories. But the story needs a great storyteller. Thanks for all of it, Jo.

I never talk about ‘Harry Potter’ because I think that would rob children of something that’s private to them. I think too many things get explained, so I hate talking about it.

I love working in New York theater.

And it’s a human need to be told stories. The more we’re governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.

You know, London is so sprawling, and you can sometimes forget that anybody else is on a stage anywhere else.

I have every sympathy for writers. It’s a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, ‘I’m not saying that’ or, ‘How about we move this to here? Wouldn’t that make that bit of the story better?’ But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves.

I approach every part I’m asked to do and decide to do from exactly the same angle: who is this person, what does he want, how does he attempt to get it, and what happens to him when he doesn’t get it, or if he does?

I think the thing about film is, as it gets proved by a lot of young filmmakers now, that the medium will just go on reinventing itself, and so you just hope to be a part of that and not a part of some kind of endless regurgitation or ‘Here I am doing what you know I do’ kind of thing.

The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-’80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club – or whatever the music was at that time – would not have been on my agenda.

The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial.

Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play.

I have a love-hate relationship with white silk.

I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: ‘You’re going to forget your lines’.

I am the character you are not supposed to like.

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads. There’s a great deal of wonderful energy there. They say ‘yes’ to things; not like the endless ‘nos’ and ‘hrrumphs’ you get in England!

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, ‘I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.’ Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

I was a student in London in the ’70s, so CBGB really wasn’t on my radar at all. Obviously, I was aware of the emergence of the Police in England and as an art student, I was very aware of David Byrne, but I suppose my musical taste at that time certainly didn’t stretch towards the Dead Boys or the Ramones.

So you can’t judge the character you’re playing ever.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure.

Older people say, ‘Oh I loved you in ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ and that’s the only film they want to talk about. Equally, there are people who only want to talk about ‘Galaxy Quest.’ And there’s a whole bunch of teenagers who only want to talk about ‘Dogma.’

Being on the stage in New York is always exciting because you feel like you’re part of the life of the city.

It’s a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I’m in. There’s a horrible inescapability to it.

Each character I play has different dimensions. I’m not interested in words that pull them together.

I like it when stories are left open.

Actors are actually very supportive of each other.

The directors you trust the most are the ones, when you ask them a question, they’ve got the guts to say, ‘I don’t know.’

What’s interesting about the process of acting is how often you don’t know what you’re doing.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

I don’t think it’s right that everybody knows everything about me.

I’m very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you’re reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.

Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.

I think there should be laughs in everything. Sometimes, it’s a slammed door, a pie in the face or just a recognition of our frailties.

The point about a great story is that it’s got a beginning, a middle and end.

On film you put all your energies into a single glance.

Talent is an accident of genes – and a responsibility.

If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

Mellow doesn’t describe me. I’m hungry every day.