A collection of quotes and sayings by Dustin Hoffman on movies, children, tv-shows, envy, sunshine, critics, fear, star, country, memories, life, fantasy and boredom.
89 Thought Provoking Quotes By Dustin Hoffman That Are Pearls Of Wisdom
Dustin’s Hoffman’s name has been cemented in this world owing to his versatile contributions to the film industry. As a dedicated method actor, Hoffman remains an integral part of Hollywood and continues to give the audience entertaining hits year after year. His invaluable advice and gentle encouragement to other struggling actors have often been highlighted in the media. His acute understanding of life and struggle despite initial fame paved the way for his success and anchored his principles. Hoffman’s enduring legacy as a veteran actor will continue to inspire many. We have compiled Hoffman’s thought-provoking quotes from his interviews, articles, speeches, and books written about him. Let’s take a look at his quotes on film, life, acting, fame, and struggles.
So, they had this 40-odd year friendship with each other and with Mr Harwood. So, when I came on it Albert, Tom and Maggie were in the cast. But then Albert wasn't up for it, so he had to withdraw.
Dustin Hoffman
Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don't like about directors. And sometimes they're very similar.
Dustin Hoffman
Now, I'm simply working with people I want to work with. I just want to have good working experiences and let the dice fall where they may.
Dustin Hoffman
It's very painful for us to feel we deserve a life. That's the toughest thing. That we deserve to have a life. That can take a lifetime.
Dustin Hoffman
I'm sixty-eight, I cry every chance I can.
Dustin Hoffman
The truth is, I've made about 30 movies in 30 years, and I've been criticized for 30 years for not making more movies.
Dustin Hoffman
I'd like to thank my parents for not practicing birth control.
Dustin Hoffman
I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life.
Euthanasia is legal in Hollywood. They just kill the film if it doesn't succeed immediately.
Dustin Hoffman
I love working, I'd be dead if I hadn't found myself as an actor I didn't have to be successful.
Dustin Hoffman
Next to that kid, we all look like onions.
Dustin Hoffman
I hope to God I don't win an Oscar tomorrow night. It would really depress me if I did. I really don't deserve it. It wasn't that important a part anyhow.
Dustin Hoffman
Humanity seized to exist when Israel was established.
Dustin Hoffman
We're all a little nit autistic.
Dustin Hoffman
Life is an occasion...rise to it.
Dustin Hoffman
Peter Pan, prepare to meet thy doom.
Dustin Hoffman
I wanted to find my limitations so I decided to do Shylock. And if I fail? I've never been afraid of that. I have other fears - doing bad work knowingly is the worst fear.
Dustin Hoffman
Look at the studio filled with glamorous merchandise. Fabulous and exciting bonus prizes. Thousands of dollars in cash. Over $150,000 just waiting to be won as we present our big bonanza of cash on Wheel Of Fortune.
Dustin Hoffman
I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but not hell.
Dustin Hoffman
I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been, and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been.
Dustin Hoffman
I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.
Dustin Hoffman
There's nothing that I love more than predawn. I'm with the dogs, I make coffee, and there's no one up.
Dustin Hoffman
Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.
It isn’t a big jump in the imagination to see yourself living alone like Mr Hoppy.
Dustin Hoffman
One of the things you can do as an actor, is compensate for the things you can't do in life.
Dustin Hoffman
That's what we're all looking for, the place where the work leads us.
Dustin Hoffman
I decided a long time ago but sometimes it takes you 40 years to get around to doing something - and that's the truthful answer.
Dustin Hoffman
Lightbulbs die, my sweet. I will depart.
Dustin Hoffman
There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?
Dustin Hoffman
Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.
Dustin Hoffman
There is something unnatural about marriage. These two people are not going to be the same people in a few years. The trick is to live your own life while sharing the same space.
Dustin Hoffman
The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.
Dustin Hoffman
I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.
Dustin Hoffman
We need to band together as a unit every day, especially to conquer the strength of the AIDS virus.
But I would reinvent myself if I could. As a sexy leading man! We all would like that, but I don't know how to.
Dustin Hoffman
There's too many interesting women I have…not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.
Dustin Hoffman
I think 'retirement' goes hand in hand with people who make a living by having a 'job.' I don't think we-the .00001 percent of the population who are so fortunate to love passionately what we do-consider it a 'job.
Dustin Hoffman
Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.
Dustin Hoffman
There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.
Dustin Hoffman
If you can get out there and say I'm going to...I'm willing to fail at what I feel is right, that's it.
Dustin Hoffman
Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why
Dustin Hoffman
If you're waiting for the job, you're dead.
Dustin Hoffman
37 seconds, well used, is a lifetime.
Dustin Hoffman
Life stinks, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy it.
Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me... aren't you?
Dustin Hoffman
To have a successful marriage, a man must, on a fundamental level be scared shitless of his wife.
Dustin Hoffman
I got into acting so that I could meet girls. Pretty girls came later. First, I wanted to start off with someone with two legs, who'd smile at me and look soft.
Dustin Hoffman
I love acting, and I`m not going to determine what I do based on what I fear other people might think. I do what I want to do.
Dustin Hoffman
I knew I finally made it as a performer when I began hearing rumors that I was gay.
Dustin Hoffman
What makes divorce happen is that you can't be in the same space any more, for whatever reason - but the love stays. And that's the killer. That's where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from.
Dustin Hoffman
It's true what they say about failure. You don't learn from success.
Dustin Hoffman
I don't like the fact that I have to get older so fast, but I like the fact that I'm aging so well.
Dustin Hoffman
You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.
Dustin Hoffman
This is your life. Now go make it the one you've always wanted.
Dustin Hoffman
Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I've never been bored.
Dustin Hoffman
I think there's always going to be some kind of bigotry or some kind of racism. There has to be, because people can't feel that they have any hero qualities unless there's someone beneath them.
Well this is aptly called a junket, for both of us. I have never been to a house of prostitution, but I understand that you get in more than seven minutes.
Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.
I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in.
Dustin Hoffman
And that's another reason to make this movie: We can put plays on film now, at a relatively small cost, and they will reach an audience they would never have reached otherwise.
If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you're a star you're dead already. You're embalmed.
Dustin Hoffman
In my room as a kid... I'd play a fighter and get knocked to the floor and come back to win.
Dustin Hoffman
For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible.
I did a movie called Marathon Man and it was one of my best memories.
Dustin Hoffman
There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.
Dustin Hoffman
I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.
I wanted to be a jazz pianist, but I wasn't good enough. I got into city college because I didn't have the grades to get into university. I took acting because it was a way to get three credits. I just needed three credits and my friend told me to take acting because it was like gym - nobody fails you. I took it and that's literally how I got involved in acting.
Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.
The plight of the actor, even if he's a star, is the plight of the women's movement. They're saying the same thing to us: get into bed, give me a good time, then give me something to eat, go get the laundry, be a good girl.
Dustin Hoffman
My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren.
Dustin Hoffman
Usually, those people don't even like actors and they can't wait until they get in the cutting room. They kind of break down in categories: directors who like to be surprised and some of them abhor being surprised. As far as directing, we all direct when we're acting in movies... every single one of us.
Dustin Hoffman
Money is another pressure. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that there's a certain luxury in having no money. I spent ten years in New York not having it, not worrying about it. Suddenly you have it, then you worry, where is it going? Am I doing the right thing with it?
Dustin Hoffman
People like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity - and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
Dustin Hoffman
In terms of the stars, the only ones I cast were Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. I was in Los Angeles working and a lot of this took place on the telephone. I'd met Maggie [Smith] once and I'd come back-stage, which I'm usually loathe to do because as an actor you don't want people coming back because you want to get home [laughs].
Dustin Hoffman
So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
Dustin Hoffman
We all believe what we read. I read how Tom Cruise and I were two big egos holding up shooting. I know that isn't true - but if I wasn't making a movie with him and I just picked up the paper, I'd believe it. That's interesting, isn't it?
