Durning Quotes

#1. I never turned down anything and never argued with any producer or director.

Charles Durning

#2. Not every man in the Senate is some kind of masterful schemer, exerting all his energies to acquire more power and influence at the expense of all others." "No," Isana agreed. "Some of them are incompetent schemers.

Jim Butcher

#3. The way to truly help someone is for me to not get immersed in their suffering.

Byron Katie

#4. Mob rule can not be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#5. I was doing judo before anybody knew it existed in this country.

Charles Durning

#6. Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny.

Alan Thein Durning

#7. If I had my druthers, I would do only stage work.

Charles Durning

#8. I'd like to have a decade of my life back. I dropped into a void for almost a decade.

Charles Durning

#9. Every woman wants a man who'll fall in love with her soul as well as her body.

Rainbow Rowell

#10. This generosity that has been offered to the United States says very much about the Venezuelan spirit.

Harry Belafonte

#11. You're out there on a high wire without a net, and that's the way actors operate. They have to be fearless about how they work and they have to create a life for the audience in 90 minutes and make them believe.

Charles Durning

#12. I think I've done 200 plays and 125 movies, so I've been very lucky to have made a living at acting.

Charles Durning

#13. Of course, I'm not often the top dog, but sometimes it's better not to be top dog, because you last longer. If a movie or play flops, you always blame the lead. They say, 'He couldn't carry it.' They always blame him. But they rarely blame the second or third banana.

Charles Durning

#14. An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

Mark Twain

#15. I lack confidence as an actor.

Charles Durning

#16. There's no nobility with war. It's tear-'em-up destruction that leaves you frustrated, bitter and angry ... If you really knew what it was like for an hour, you wouldn't want anyone to go through it.

Charles Durning

#17. If we attempt to preserve the consumer economy indefinitely, ecological forces will dismantle it savagely. If we proceed to dismantle it gradually ourselves, we will have the opportunity of replacing it with a low consumption economy that can endure.

Alan Thein Durning

#18. Acting is ephemeral. You can't hang it on a wall. You can't throw it off. And you can't bring it out of a closet. It's there one night and it's gone the next, at least with stage acting anyhow.

Charles Durning

#19. Be there for your kids. Later, when you need them, they'll be there for you.

Zig Ziglar

#20. The words you say to yourself affect your self-image,

Robin S. Sharma

#21. I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

Charles Durning

#22. The biggest battle is the war against ignorance.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

#23. I was born a character actor.

Charles Durning

#24. I can't count how many of my friends are in the cemetery at Normandy, the heroes are still there, the real heroes.

Charles Durning

#25. In order for your dreams to come true, you've got to stay awake.

Charles Durning

#26. Nobody wants to disappoint the boss and get fired. But if the boss hasn't said this is important, it's going to die a slow death in bureaucracy and that explains a lot of the problems.

Robert M. Edsel

#27. But the basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations to meet their own needs.

Alan Thein Durning

#28. There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don't want anyone to know about.

Charles Durning

#29. Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we've engaged in 'right' living, verses believing that living is a 'right.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#30. I was born looking older - and I've been aging since I was a teenager.

Charles Durning

#31. Sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don't.

Charles Durning

#32. Dancing came easy for me. Acting came hard.

Charles Durning

#33. You make the money in movies and TV so you can do theater. I do a play a year ... somewhere.

Charles Durning

#34. That place that no one knows about - horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting.

Charles Durning