Hal Holbrook
American actor (1925–2021)
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- I don't have a director. The audience directs me.
- Mark Twain cannot be defined.
- Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.
- I developed a resistance to authority. Not to discipline-I learned that. But to authority. I like to think for myself. And I like to cause trouble.
- I have a suicide impulse.
- To communicate with each other, we got to get mad at each other sometimes.
- I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.
- You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.
- Man is the religious animal. He is the only one that's got true religion, several of them.
- We don't have truth delivered to us very often, especially in this very commercialized world.
- We live in a democracy. We have this extraordinary opportunity to use our mind and say what we think, speak as we think. Sometimes what we say is objectionable to other people. But that is part of a free society.
- One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.
- I like to be who I am.
- There's no good guys and bad guys.
- "Most everybody today that's young is operating under the insane idea that what we've got going on is the best that there is. But it's not. Current entertainment is cheap, shoddy, infantile, adolescent, not grown-up. We're fed imagery that's really pornographic, by people with an infantile idea of sexuality. It's a sad and depressing thing."
- "On stage your job as actor is to present and show the story by your behavior, body language, and vocal work. In film, you musn't. You just have to be. You are...and it's mostly intuitive. The amount of characterization you do is very minimal. In fact, you try not to act at all. It's actually better that way, and it's taken me years to learn that."