By Humphrey Bogart "You're not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi." "The phrase 'movie star' is misused so much that it has no real meaning any more. Any little pinhead who makes one picture is called a star.... To be a star you have to drag your weight in the box office and be recognized wherever you go." "I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum. Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with only a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed." "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world." "The only point in making money is you can tell some big shot where to go." "Here's looking at you, kid." "The whole world is about three drinks behind." "Things are never so bad they can't be worse." "The best way to survive an Oscar is to never try to win another one. You've seen what happens to some Oscar winners. They spend the rest of their lives turning down scripts while searching for the great role to win another one. Hell, I hope I'm never even nominated again. It's meat-and-potato roles for me from now on." (quoted in 1951, following his Best Actor Academy Award win for The African Queen) "The only thing you owe the public is a good performance." "Ah, nuts. I'm an actor. I just do what comes naturally." (when asked if he followed any specific acting method) "I'm a professional. I've done pretty well, don't you think? I've survived in a pretty rough business." "...when he [Arthur Hopkins] was getting ready to produce The Petrified Forest, he sent for me. When I dropped into his office, Robert E. Sherwood - who wrote the play and was a friend of mine - was there. Hopkins said to me, 'I've got a good role for you. A gangster role." (discussing how he was cast as Duke Mantee) "I didn't do anything I've never done before. But when the camera moves in on that Bergman's face, and she's saying she loves you, it would make anybody look romantic." (on his captivating love scenes with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca) "After me, he's the best." (joking about close friend, Spencer Tracy) "I went on the stage the first time as a gag. I'd been kidding Neil Hamilton about the soft life of an actor. 'Acting doesn't look very hard to me,' I'd said. The funny thing was that that was what I actually thought. The last night of the play, he dared me to go on in his place. I took the dare, and it was all a horrible fiasco. In one scene, an actor was supposed to be mad at me, and I thought he was really mad; he scared the hell out of me. It was the first time I had been face to face with actors at work. I did't realize how convincing they could be. After that experience, I thought, 'Never again.'" "Hemingway tells me you're not a good writer." (to author John Steinbeck, upon meeting him for the first time) ........................................................................................................................................................................... Quotes About Humphrey Bogart ... "He is the only man I have ever known who truly and completely belonged to himself...His convictions about life, work and people were so strong they were unshakeable. Nothing - no one - could make him lower his standards, lessen his character...He had the greatest gifts a man could have: respect for himself, for his craft; integrity about life as well as work." (actress and fourth wife Betty "Lauren" Bacall) "Bogart was quite alarming to meet, for the first time, with his sardonic humor and his snarl that passed for a smile. It took me a little while to realize that he had perfected an elaborate camouflage to cover up one of the kindest and most generous of hearts." (actor and close friend David Niven) "She [Betty Bacall] and Bogie seemed to have the most enormous opinion of each other's charms, and when they fought, it was with the utter confidence of two cats locked deliciously in the same cage." (actress and The African Queen co-star, Katharine Hepburn) "Bogart is a first-class person with an obsessive compulsion to behave like a second-class person." (friend and owner of the popular restaurant Romanoff's, Mike "Prince" Romanoff) "Himself, he never took too seriously - his work, most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect." (producer/director John Huston) "Bogie was never wrong about people. If he thought a person was all right, the person was all right. And if he thought a person was a phony, the person was a phony." (friend and long time agent, Sam Jaffe) "I kissed him, but I never really knew him." (actress and Casablanca co-star Ingrid Bergman) "She [Betty Bacall] matched his insolence. Betty came along at exactly the right time for Bogie. He was mature and she was a kid, and I think he had a ball showing her what life was all about." (friend and actress Bette Davis) "Bogart thought of himself as Scaramouch, the mischievous scamp who sets off the fireworks, then nips out." (writer and producer Nunnally Johnson) |
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