Robert Duvall

“You have a little bit of feeling for everyone you play.”

“As long as they keep offering me some good parts and so forth - there are some parts out there that fit me pretty well - I'll keep going for a while.”

“Being a star is an agent's dream, not an actor's.”

“When I'm at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.”

“I'm better than Olivier.”

“Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.”

“You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.”

“I wouldn't mind starting to ride some more if I had a really good horse to just work a little bit with every day.”

“Spending two years on my uncle's ranch in Montana as a young man gave me the wisdom and the thrust to do westerns.”

“I'll keep on acting 'til they wipe the drool. I like the business. I like to do different parts and diverse characters. I haven't lost my enthusiasm yet!”

“Too many people think that economics is this subject that should wait until the university level. But it can't wait that long.”

“My father's people... are from Fairfax in northern Virginia, just across the Mason-Dixon line. So it was an honour to play Lee, he was a great general.”

“God does guide the lives of individuals and does fill them with the Holy Ghost.”

“High Noon is a pretty corny movie.”

“There was nothing wrong with shouting at God.”

“Everybody likes to win.”

“I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.”

“A young actor once asked me, What do you do between jobs? I said, Hobbies, hobbies, and more hobbies.”

“It's like kids playing house: 'You play the father, I'll play the mother.' You know, you dress up, you play, they pay, you go home. It's a game - acting's a game.”

“Well, it's like my movie, 'The Apostle.' Some people in the North don't get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don't shout, you can't play one of those guys.”