Quotes from Richard Attenborough

I can't write, I can't paint, I don't compose.

My family were liberal with a small 'l' but passionately doers. I wanted to be a doer.

If someone says they're going to ring me at 10 o'clock and it's 10 past and they haven't rung, I'm irritated.

I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.

You act in a movie, and at the end of the day, the director and editor decide what your performance is.

My father thought Gandhi was a great man. I suppose subconsciously, consciously even, I was aware that I wanted to please him and Ma, so I thought doing something like 'Gandhi' would be phenomenal.

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

At my age the only problem is with remembering names. When I call everyone darling, it has damn all to do with passionately adoring them, but I know I'm safe calling them that. Although, of course, I adore them too.

There is a LIGHT in this world. A healing spirit more powerful than any darkness we may encounter. We sometime lose sight of this force when there is suffering, and too much pain. Then suddenly, the spirit will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways.

What actually happened with 'Miracle' was that someone saw me in 'Jurassic Park' and said, 'We want someone with a white beard - how about him?' I've got a round face, white hair, a white beard. I can wear half-moon glasses and waddle a little, cope with a cane, raise my hat.

In the late 1940s, there weren't any pop stars, and TV didn't exist.

Irreverence is an essential part of our culture.

The old adage about acting - that it's 98% energy and 2% talent - is true, you know.

I prefer fact to fiction.

If you've ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.

I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody's life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.

I am passionately opposed to capital punishment, and I have been all my life.

I don't really like the Oscars; it's a commercial promotional event. It helps immeasurably to sell films, but it's hardly the Nobel prize.

When I'm directing a movie, nothing else matters.

I think 'E.T.' is a quite extraordinary piece of cinema.

In other words, if you - the cost of promoting movies, the advertising and promotion of a movie, the budget is almost as large as the cost of the movie.

I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant - that don't come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, an argument and so on - and I can't do that, and I'm not in that bracket at all.

I don't read a great deal of fiction, to my shame, other than the classics.

Well, I think In Love and War, which had a wonderful performance by Sandy, Sandra Bullock, who the authorities and, the supposed authorities, in cinema didn't want to know about.