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Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

Al Pacino

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Al Pacino
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 25
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Manhattan borough
New York City
Alfredo James Pacino
Reason
Full
Sometimes
Days
Stayed
Way
Feeling
Shakespeare
Reading
Reasons
Actors
Spend
Words
Actor
Feelings
Joy
Certain
Saying

More quotes by Al Pacino

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My weaknesses... I wish I could come up with something. I'd probably have the same pause if you asked me what my strengths are. Maybe they're the same thing.
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Chekhov was as important to me as anybody as a writer.
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If I find something and feel as though I can contribute to [it] in a way and feel I'm in it, whatever that means, I'm expressing something that I feel is a way to exercise my talent and help communicate a role as a human being in a movie, I will do that.
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Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you're going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.
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The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.
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I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.
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One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, The Sea Gull, when was 14 in the Bronx.
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I like, for instance, 'Serpico.' I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could - I could embody him. I could, you know, I could work and get to know him and have him help me with the text, the script and become him. It's almost like a painter having a model to become.
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Drinking and smoking grass were a part of my life as far back as I can remember.
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Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would've wanted to play 10 years ago, I don't want to play now.
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I don't think actors should ever expect to get a role, because the disappointment is too great. You've got to think of things as an opportunity. An audition's an opportunity to have an audience.
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Love is overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate
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I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
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Responsibilities are relative. My responsibility is to a character in a script, to a part I'm playing.
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I’ve always been in the theater. I’ve always gone to it. That’s been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running - fleeing - to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.
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I was never very happy with performing it didn't turn me on much.
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My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.
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The physical stamina [in Revolution]. I was just shocked by it. I didn't think I had it in me ever, and I wasn't terribly young when I did it. I was in my early forties. That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.
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Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.
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Either I act or I die.
Al Pacino