Best 27 quotes of Antony Sher on MyQuotes

A lot of good actors tend to be quite introverted as people.

As a gay Jewish white South African, I belong to quite a lot of minority groups. You constantly have to question who you are, what you are and whether you have the courage to be who you are.

As we're leaving the King's Arms Hotel after Sunday lunch, I watch a beautiful white dove walking down the wet road. A car approaches and the bird accidentally turns into the wheel rather than away from it. A gentle crunch. The car passes. A shape like a discarded napkin left in the road. Still perfectly white, no red stains, but bearing no relation anymore to the shape of a bird. A trail of white feathers flutter down the road after the car. The suddeness is very upsetting. That gentle crunch.

I believe deeply in therapy. There's no one in the world who wouldn't benefit from it.

I don't believe in an afterlife.

I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.

If I could write a letter to my teenage self I'd probably say something like: "You ain't gonna believe what will become of you.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

I love the mixture that's in me. It makes me me. And that's why it's such a shame that people waste energy in denying who they are.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

I'm always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

I've been quoting the book [on Peter Sutcliffe] constantly in rehearsals. Some members of the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written. Some of the women have expressed more - disgust and anger. What are they saying? They'd prefer not to know, not to understand? They'd prefer certain areas of life to be censored? Isn't that partly what breeds the Sutcliffes and the Nilsens?

I was a weak kid, not good at what all the boys at school were good at and I found that by acting, by being other people, I could liberate myself from those inadequacies.

Life is just more comfortable if you're honest and open about everything. I spent so many years being in the closet about one thing or another.

Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.

My grandparents all came from Lithuania to South Africa. My first novel, Middlepost, is a fictional account of that journey.

Now the dressing-room full of RSC hierarchy. Suddenly Trevor Nunn pushes his way through and 'Trevs' me. I've heard a lot about this 'Trevving', but never had it done to me. From what I'd heard, a 'Trev' is an arm round your shoulder and a sideways squeeze. But this 'Trev' is a full frontal hug, so complete and so intimate that the dressing-room instantly clears, as if by suction. I'm left alone in the arms of this famous man wondering whether it's polite to let go.

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

The effort of learning. It's the same when you approach any new skill or technique, from a dance step to driving a car. The effort of learning stops you, at first, from doing it well.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Why is an actor's unintentional giggling called a 'corpse'? It seems to me quite the opposite. It proves that he's very much alive, and can still tell how silly this all is: him dressed up as someone else speaking words written by a third party.

I can feel the power of the words doing the work. Must trust language more.

Michael Caine should have the last word on the reviews: 'What about those reviews then?' 'I don't read them.' 'Don't read them? You wrote them didn't you?

This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.