Paul Scofield Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr? If you have always been that, then why lose your title?
I have a title, which is the same one that I have always had.
But it's not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully.

Paul Scofield
Oh, I suppose my wife and I will open a bottle of champagne with another couple.

Paul Scofield
King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.

Paul Scofield
It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.

Paul Scofield
I found at this point that effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do, that I didn't want to make effects, that I wanted, as it were, to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.

Paul Scofield
I decided a long time ago I didn't want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don't think it's a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.

Paul Scofield
As an actor I don't admit to any limitations. In rehearsal one comes up against apparently insuperable barriers, but if one can imaginatively get past them, overreach one's natural reach, it is astonishing how elastic one can become. I've got to go not so far as I can, but as far as is needed. It's up to somebody else to say if I've made a fool of myself.

Paul Scofield
I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered early in my life, practically when I was a child, that I could do something that in the end I finally wanted to do all my life. It has something to do with being completely removed from oneself, which doesn't necessarily mean one is uncomfortable inside oneself. It just means it's a great relief to be inhabiting somebody else. It can be a tremendously liberating sensation.

Paul Scofield
As you get older, the more you know, so the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger.

Paul Scofield