Top 86 Dustin Hoffman Quotes
#2. The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.
Dustin Hoffman
#3. It's very painful for us to feel we deserve a life. That's the toughest thing. That we deserve to have a life. That can take a lifetime.
Dustin Hoffman
#4. Money is another pressure. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that there's a certain luxury in having no money. I spent ten years in New York not having it, not worrying about it. Suddenly you have it, then you worry, where is it going? Am I doing the right thing with it?
Dustin Hoffman
#5. My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren.
Dustin Hoffman
#6. A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
Dustin Hoffman
#7. I want to thank my parents for not practicing birth control.
Dustin Hoffman
#9. There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?
Dustin Hoffman
#10. Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.
Dustin Hoffman
#11. Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.
Dustin Hoffman
#12. I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby?
Dustin Hoffman
#13. Life stinks, but that doesn't mean you don't enjoy it.
Dustin Hoffman
#14. But I would reinvent myself if I could. As a sexy leading man! We all would like that, but I don't know how to.
Dustin Hoffman
#16. There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.
Dustin Hoffman
#17. To have a successful marriage, a man must, on a fundamental level be scared shitless of his wife.
Dustin Hoffman
#18. It's true what they say about failure. You don't learn from success.
Dustin Hoffman
#19. That's what we're all looking for, the place where the work leads us.
Dustin Hoffman
#20. This is your life. Now go make it the one you've always wanted.
Dustin Hoffman
#21. There is something unnatural about marriage. These two people are not going to be the same people in a few years. The trick is to live your own life while sharing the same space.
Dustin Hoffman
#22. We all believe what we read. I read how Tom Cruise and I were two big egos holding up shooting. I know that isn't true - but if I wasn't making a movie with him and I just picked up the paper, I'd believe it. That's interesting, isn't it?
Dustin Hoffman
#24. So, they had this 40-odd year friendship with each other and with Mr Harwood. So, when I came on it Albert, Tom and Maggie were in the cast. But then Albert wasn't up for it, so he had to withdraw.
Dustin Hoffman
#25. There's nothing that I love more than predawn. I'm with the dogs, I make coffee, and there's no one up.
Dustin Hoffman
#26. I don't like the fact that I have to get older so fast, but I like the fact that I'm aging so well.
Dustin Hoffman
#27. I feel cheated never being able to know what it's like to get pregnant, carry a child and breast feed.
Dustin Hoffman
#28. God knows I've done enough crap in my life to grow a few flowers.
Dustin Hoffman
#29. The two basic items necessary to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk.
Dustin Hoffman
#30. I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life.
Dustin Hoffman
#31. I believe - though I may be wrong, because I'm no expert - that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil.
Dustin Hoffman
#32. I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but not hell.
Dustin Hoffman
#33. Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.
Dustin Hoffman
#35. I got into acting so that I could meet girls. Pretty girls came later. First, I wanted to start off with someone with two legs, who'd smile at me and look soft.
Dustin Hoffman
#36. People like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity - and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
Dustin Hoffman
#37. Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why
Dustin Hoffman
#38. It isn't a big jump in the imagination to see yourself living alone like Mr Hoppy.
Dustin Hoffman
#39. Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.
Dustin Hoffman
#40. We need to band together as a unit every day, especially to conquer the strength of the AIDS virus.
Dustin Hoffman
#43. In my room as a kid ... I'd play a fighter and get knocked to the floor and come back to win.
Dustin Hoffman
#44. Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don't like about directors. And sometimes they're very similar.
Dustin Hoffman
#45. I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.
Dustin Hoffman
#46. One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you're a star you're dead already. You're embalmed.
Dustin Hoffman
#47. Well this is aptly called a junket, for both of us. I have never been to a house of prostitution, but I understand that you get in more than seven minutes.
Dustin Hoffman
#48. I think 'retirement' goes hand in hand with people who make a living by having a 'job.' I don't think we-the .00001 percent of the population who are so fortunate to love passionately what we do-consider it a 'job.
Dustin Hoffman
#49. So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
Dustin Hoffman
#50. I think the most insulting thing you can do to a director is to challenge when he or she is satisfied with your interpretation.
Dustin Hoffman
#51. If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
Dustin Hoffman
#52. One of the things you can do as an actor, is compensate for the things you can't do in life.
Dustin Hoffman
#53. I think we all felt it on this movie - crew and cast. You never know when you're making a movie ... no one is saying in the middle of Casablanca that this is going to be a classic. The lead actors had turned it down and I think they wound up with B-list actors at the time.
Dustin Hoffman
#54. Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me ... aren't you?
Dustin Hoffman
#55. Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I've never been bored.
Dustin Hoffman
#56. Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.
Dustin Hoffman
#58. And that's another reason to make this movie: We can put plays on film now, at a relatively small cost, and they will reach an audience they would never have reached otherwise.
Dustin Hoffman
#59. Humanity seized to exist when Israel was established.
Dustin Hoffman
#60. For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible.
Dustin Hoffman
#62. What makes divorce happen is that you can't be in the same space any more, for whatever reason - but the love stays. And that's the killer. That's where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from.
Dustin Hoffman
#63. I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.
Dustin Hoffman
#64. I think right now television is the best that it's ever been, and I think that it's the worst that film has ever been.
Dustin Hoffman
#65. I knew I finally made it as a performer when I began hearing rumors that I was gay.
Dustin Hoffman
#66. Now, I'm simply working with people I want to work with. I just want to have good working experiences and let the dice fall where they may.
Dustin Hoffman
#67. I love working, I'd be dead if I hadn't found myself as an actor I didn't have to be successful.
Dustin Hoffman
#68. There were a few things that went into it. When you're doing something you're trying to be your audience at the same time, so if somebody tells me that this is a movie about retired opera singers, you think 'maybe I'll wait for it to come to DVD'. You're not rushing off to see it.
Dustin Hoffman
#69. I decided a long time ago but sometimes it takes you 40 years to get around to doing something - and that's the truthful answer.
Dustin Hoffman
#70. A "take" is an opportunity to fail ... and we think that we have to get it right all the time.
Dustin Hoffman
#71. The truth is, I've made about 30 movies in 30 years, and I've been criticized for 30 years for not making more movies.
Dustin Hoffman
#72. I wanted to find my limitations so I decided to do Shylock. And if I fail? I've never been afraid of that. I have other fears - doing bad work knowingly is the worst fear.
Dustin Hoffman
#73. There's too many interesting women I have ... not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.
Dustin Hoffman
#74. I did a movie called Marathon Man and it was one of my best memories.
Dustin Hoffman
#75. I hope to God I don't win an Oscar tomorrow night. It would really depress me if I did. I really don't deserve it. It wasn't that important a part anyhow.
Dustin Hoffman
#76. You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.
Dustin Hoffman
#77. Euthanasia is legal in Hollywood. They just kill the film if it doesn't succeed immediately.
Dustin Hoffman
#78. If you can get out there and say I'm going to ... I'm willing to fail at what I feel is right, that's it.
Dustin Hoffman
#79. I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.
Dustin Hoffman
#81. Look at the studio filled with glamorous merchandise. Fabulous and exciting bonus prizes. Thousands of dollars in cash. Over $150,000 just waiting to be won as we present our big bonanza of cash on Wheel Of Fortune.
Dustin Hoffman
#82. I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in.
Dustin Hoffman
#83. Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar ... They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.
Dustin Hoffman
#84. I decided to become an actor because I was failing in school and I needed the credits.
Dustin Hoffman
#85. The plight of the actor, even if he's a star, is the plight of the women's movement. They're saying the same thing to us: get into bed, give me a good time, then give me something to eat, go get the laundry, be a good girl.
Dustin Hoffman
#86. Somehow I think it was declared very early on that I was the - if not the black sheep of the family, not a very good student.
Dustin Hoffman
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