Ben Kingsley quotes

I like to do one or two films a year. But I can't prepare for something until I know what it's going to be. So I find that doing some narration, or maybe a documentary, is like going back into the gym for a couple of days.

Ben Kingsley

If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.

Ben Kingsley

Great drama deals with the struggle for people's selves. You see it on the screen. Everyone is involved with the struggle with their own soul, struggling for that soul and to possess that soul.

Ben Kingsley

I found the absolute thrill of translating ancient poetic text into totally visceral, tangible and even relevant, immediate and urgent language. I was thrilled by Shakespeare. It surprised me, my profound delight in deciphering Shakespeare and making it completely flesh-and-blood.

Ben Kingsley

Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.

Ben Kingsley

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

Ben Kingsley

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

Ben Kingsley

Quite often when I'm cast in a movie, I'm asked to bring whatever intelligence is there to the surface.

Ben Kingsley

I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.

Ben Kingsley

I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate.

Ben Kingsley

When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.

Ben Kingsley

The Dostoevsky in Russia is very alive.

Ben Kingsley

I was very lazy in the sixth form at school, I wasn't motivated properly, I handled it very badly and I was not given a place at university to study medicine.

Ben Kingsley

I've met holocaust survivor victims, through other films, and I know what survivor guilt is like.

Ben Kingsley

John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.

Ben Kingsley

I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.

Ben Kingsley

I didn't go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey.

Ben Kingsley

I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

Ben Kingsley

There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.

Ben Kingsley

People have been, as I said earlier, crushed and distorted and forced into all kinds of strange postures as human beings because of circumstance. I don't know what monsters and demons would be in me if I felt that violence was the only way out of a very dark corner.

Ben Kingsley

You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman, healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them,.

Ben Kingsley

If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.

Ben Kingsley

It doesn't get any easier. I still get very nervous and excited, but I'm hoping what I'm trying to do is simplify. That's what I'm trying to do.

Ben Kingsley

I'm holding a mirror to the audience and telling them there is a violent person in all of us.

Ben Kingsley

I don't think that making ourselves invulnerable to feeling any onslaught to our feelings will help us in life, ultimately. I think we only learn and grow by allowing ourselves to be really challenged by those feelings that do overwhelm us occasionally.

Ben Kingsley

I love creatures in their pure form.

Ben Kingsley

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy. It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

Ben Kingsley

In England, it's now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It's not even on my passport. They've taken Mister away from me.

Ben Kingsley

If we hit the collective nerve of the audience on that night, that they would be standing up and rushing towards the stage to hug us.

Ben Kingsley

It would frighten me if I were to learn somewhere along the line that all of those emotions had been suppressed throughout my entire life, that would be very scary, because nature would express them, somehow, in some form.

Ben Kingsley

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

Ben Kingsley

When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.

Ben Kingsley

There are other non-English, Asian, Mexican, many, many directors I'd love to work with of different nationalities because a different national temperament and a different rhythm and a different way of looking at things is enlightening to work with.

Ben Kingsley

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

Ben Kingsley

It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.

Ben Kingsley