Alec Guinness

"You can't create experience. You must undergo it."

"A lot of people imagine that there's some sort of inner sanctum where I sit and work out my feelings."

"To say that one waits a lifetime for his life to be revealed is to say that one waits for the moment when life is condemned and has looked back on itself."

"Fear is the path to the dark side."

"The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself."

"I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday."

"Very often a man's spiritual development is hindered by his social eminence."

"I have learned something from my many mistakes."

"Acting is a kind of catharsis for the actor."

"All the time one wants to be doing something else."

"I don't feel confident that I am a good actor."

"Cynicism is a state of mind that I have found to be less rewarding than cynicism."

"A lot of people think playing a villain is fun."

"Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep."

"I know now why you cry, but it's something I can no longer touch."

"The art of acting is not to act. To have a visceral reaction to imaginary circumstances is not the same as acting and the public are easily fooled."

"I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be stripped down to its smallest common denominator in order to be appreciated."

"It seems to me that we cannot avoid much longer the duty of determining where the world is going."

"Do not give way to useless feelings of shame or defeat because of your past failures."

"The rewards of being alive to it, I mean, not to push the dead quite so far away."

"I feel like there's a weight to being alive."

"I would love to play an alien, just so I could experience a little of that otherness."

"Most of my friends are English, so if I want to spend time with them I have to go to England."

"I find it wholesome to be alone a considerable part of the time."

"It's not that I've suddenly become very moral or anything. It's just a matter of age."

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive."

"You can make anything by writing."

"I don't think any of us can compete with what we're doing now."

"I'm interested in all things, but not equally interested."

"Acting is not being. It's behaving."