- [on Marlene Dietrich] You won't believe it, but the lady is extremely funny.
- [on directing movies] It's more fulfilling than acting, but it's also more wounding to get bad reviews as a director than an actor.
- When asked by journalists in Vienna (his family's home) what I enjoy most about living and working in North America, I answered, "Freedom." The reporters told me, "We're sorry, Mr. Schell; but it needs to be something else, because we can't print that." So I rest my case.
- I am America's number-one fan. I like your food. Especially corn flakes.
- I then decided, either you are a scientist or an artist. . . . To me it is much more important . . . to admire and feel and be stimulated and inspired. . . Art comes out of chaos, not out of a mechanical analyzing. So as soon as I made up my mind, there was no sense any more in continuing to study and in getting a degree. It is like an award; it does not mean anything in itself. . . . A university degree is just a title. I don't think an artist should have a title. It was time for me to concentrate on acting.
- My father and my uncle hunt deer there [the family farm], but I do not like to hunt. I like to walk through the forest by myself. In 1948 and 1949, when I wrote part of my first novel, which I have never shown to anyone, I isolated myself in one of the hunting cabins for three months, without a telephone, without electricity, with heat only from a large open fireplace.
- Acting talent is something that all children are born with. They naturally play cops and robbers, mothers and daughters. True art in acting is different. To be an artist, you must be lonely. I feel that I must keep my life lonely in order to be as free as possible. I cannot think or act unless I am free, and I cannot be free unless I am alone. So far, I have lived like a hermit, alone, and I expect to die alone.
- I grew up reading the classics. When I'd read the books of writers like Zane Grey, my father would always say to me, "Why don't you read Goethe?" My father today is not impressed by my acting in movies. For my father, the film is not a real art, and as he is a poet, he does not care about outside success. When I see him, we talk about poetry and writing.
- One has to have the courage to make mistakes.
- I have a piano in my apartment in Munich, and I play for hours at a time for my own pleasure. After I make a film, I find I need to rest. An actor must have pauses in between work, to renew himself, to read, to walk, to chop wood. Now that I have had success, I find there are some drawbacks greater demands on my time for myself but I like it. Freedom I always had, but now the possibilities are so much greater for me to do what I want. When you want to do something that is really in your heart, you keep it there until you do it. I do not like to say what these things are. Picasso would not say, "I am now going to paint something." He would do it first. I, also, want to do it first.
- I'm Swiss, but I was born in Austria.
- Socrates once said, "Know yourself." I do not agree. I think that is bad advice. You should not know yourself. By knowing, you take away the secret of yourself. That sentence is one of the most dangerous sentences ever written, especially for an actor. If you are conscious of what you are doing, you are thinking about it, and not doing your best. You are not acting spontaneously. Every actor has a little bit of every other man inside him. And this is how it must be, for it is this that enables him, in each part he plays, to reach what he is or what he is hoping to be. Almost always, the first time I read a script it seems a little silly. It is difficult for me to find any good in it. Shakespeare is different. It is easy to read his plays, and they always seem good.
- I grew up in a theatre atmosphere and took it for granted. I remember the theatre, as a child, the way most people remember their mother's cooking. Acting was all around me, and so was poetry. I made my debut in the theatre at the age of three, in Vienna . . .
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