Quotes from Peter Lorre

I'm not scaring anybody for no money!

My family encouraged me to paint, but I was never allowed to go to the theater. Naturally, this made me interested in the theater.

I'm easy to imitate. All you need are the soft-boiled egg eyes and the bedroom voice.

The public likes me as a bad guy and I'm going to go on being one just as long as I can.

It got so that I couldn't play anything but a Peter Lorre character.

Actually, Hollywood is the reverse of what most outsiders think it is. It is not a crazy, nervous place. An actor is less bothered here than he is anywhere else. You can live your life as you please and nobody cares.

Sydney and I made so many pictures together we were becoming Abbott and Costello, so we broke up. You know Greenstreet was a comedian before he played 'The Maltese Falcon' and in that picture his dialogue consisted of seven pages in a row which he memorized weeks ahead.

I have made over 70 pictures and in only 10 of them did I portray a really 'bad man.'

Despite the fact Hollywood classes me as a 'type,' I find the roles broad enough to handle all the acting technique I can summon together.

Being typed is not important. For a while vou are typed as one thing. You get out of that. Then you are typed as something else. You can break away from everything except comedy. It's fatal to be typed as a comedian. You can't get out of that.

Terrible letters came to me. Letters from strange people; people whom I never believed lived in the world; depraved and distorted minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic.

I don't want to brag, but I can make people laugh and then be terrified.

There is really no such thing as terrifying people. It's the situation and the scene that count. Not the actor.

It's sort of sad, but the public is no longer afraid of ghosts. They laugh at them instead.

I didn't speak English very well, but I studied day and night so I'd be ready for my first break. When Hitchcock interviewed me I didn't understand a word be said, but I had been told that he liked to tell jokes so I watched him carefully and when I thought he was waiting for a laugh... I laughed.

I couldn't live without acting. In fact anybody who can live without that feeling is a complete idiot.

In New York I was taken to a restaurant where comedians gather. There were 14 who imitate me in their acts. They wanted me to give them pointers.

Interviews are horrible. All your life you are trained not to talk about yourself. Then you are expected to do nothing else, to talk only of yourself.

Just memorizing and emoting, for that you get paid. But that isn't acting.

For money, I can be a nice guy.

For the type of parts I play, I should be booed. But it's odd, fans just adore me. I can't explain it.

Making movies used to be fun in the old days. It isn't any longer. It's a coldhearted business.

Most of my pictures both in this country and abroad have been of the 'horror' variety.

I signed with Columbia for two reasons. One reason I saw two of Frank Capra s pictures in Paris, and I want to work with him. Then at Columbia, in Harry Cohn, there is only one judge to please. I could not face the juries of fourteen that I have heard about at so many large studios.