Barbara Sukowa

“You can only be a monster if people let you be a monster.”

“I always had acting work when I needed it. I think that is why, when I watch films or TV series in America, I find in small roles or in supporting roles really amazing faces, where I have the feeling these people have actually had a life outside of acting. I find it almost a pity that I've never done anything else.”

“I never really caught on in America. I don't have an agent. It's too strange for me.”

“I was very lucky: I started acting in this highly subsidized German theater world, so there was not so much job insecurity. We had great working conditions, long rehearsal times, well paid.”

“I was excited by the idea of playing a Nazi.”

“We live in a world where we don't really hear ideas. We just hear propaganda. That's not just boring. It's also very dangerous.”

“I would like people to get a differentiated historical view of Germany.”

“I started to read labels around age 18 or 19. I don't buy things that don't sound like food, and I've been that way all my life. I do go through phases, during which I eat meat for maybe three months then don't. I do eat lots of vegetables. It's the same with dairy - I'll eat it then stop.”

“Normally, if you play a part, you have the words, and you invent the personality out of your experience, your knowledge - your life, in a way.”

“My English is good because I have a good ear.”

“In France and other European countries, film stars are more celebrated. In Germany, if we are good at what we do, we are respected but not acclaimed. And, of course, we are not paid like Americans are.”

“I love work where I can find out more about the world and its history.”

“I've performed Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire' many times.”

“They wanted me to do movies and television when I was very young, and it was a big temptation, but I really thought the only way I could learn the profession was on the stage.”

“I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.”

“There was a time for German stars in the 1950s with Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, O. W. Fischer, and Maria Schell. That was a totally different generation. It all ended in 1968 during the big students' movement in my country. It was an anti-authority movement that changed everything. All my country's hierarchies, morals and values were questioned.”

“I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.”

“I have so much respect for the big opera singers that I never dare to say I'm a singer.”

“Arendt did have a certain snobbishness, though in some of her writing she expressed more democratic attitudes.”

“Women who are stronger than the society allows them to be often feel a need for something stronger than themselves, and to dissolve into it.”