Quotes

To me, war was the greatest sin. I couldn't bring myself to kill other men.

[on the closing scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1984]: And everyone remembers that, they always say to me: "Oh, but I remember the butterfly scene!" I kind of analyzed why they remember that so well and it seemed to be that in a subliminal way, in a kind of another sense, the butterfly, which emerges from being only a caterpillar, is a little bit like - maybe they don't think that way - men reaching for his soul.

I never had a great talent, but I suppose I must have had something to hang around for 50 years. I don't have any proclivity for acting. It was always difficult for me to learn my lines, which is something that should come easily to any actor.

I considered myself a Hollywood success, but there was something wrong with that success. I had everything, yet I had nothing. I had my books, my home, my companions, my music. But somehow, I was lonely."

I've always tried to make characters real and vulnerable. How I do this I'd be hard-pressed to say, but when you do achieve it, when you are totally credible, the audience can forget itself and live through you on the screen. An audience needs to forget itself, if only for a little while.

On Ginger Rogers She was a wonderful woman, a very lovely girl. We were both so busy, she was so busy at that time. We were just torn apart. Making films, she was going this way, going on location, and I was going here and going there. And then we finally said, this isn't working with us, to live this way, being two actors at the same time. Maybe it would be easier - and she went to stay at her mother's house for a while. And then time went on, and we drifted apart. She still is a marvelous girl. I think a great deal of her, she's a wonderful woman, and I think she thought I was all right too.