Top 100 Mendelsohn Quotes
#1. The Berlin of the '20s formed the foundation of my future education ... the Berlin of the UFA studios, of Fritz Lang, Lubitsch and Erich Pommer. The Berlin of the architects Gropius, Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe. The Berlin of the painters Max Libermann, Grosz, Otto Dix, Klee and Kandinsky.
Ken Adam
#2. Let me give you a little Mendelsohn 101: I came up in television in the early- to mid- 1980s in Australia.
Ben Mendelsohn
#3. I had to work with Ben Mendelsohn who's one of the great actors of our time. I had a lot of scenes with him and I was thrilled to be on the set with him; I just wanted to see how we were going to play it.
John Leguizamo
#4. The difference between that man and me," Alan Mendelsohn said, "is that I am a connoisseur, and he is a fanatic.
Daniel Pinkwater
#5. I don't know if tennis players feel like that but when you have a great opponent - although I didn't feel like he [ Ben Mendelsohn ] was an opponent - you just know your game is going to jack up and it's just going to raise the bar. I couldn't wait for that elevation.
John Leguizamo
#6. The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#7. The reason doctors are so dangerous is that they believe in what they are doing.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#8. 'Animal Kingdom' was an amalgam of two people that I had met-slash-known, not particularly well. They were both very, very scary people for very different reasons.
Ben Mendelsohn
#10. The very rough story is this: Melbourne boy, out of both my parents' houses at a young age, lived with my grandmother, drama teacher twisted me into doing this TV thing that I thought my mates were doing, too.
Ben Mendelsohn
#11. 'Slow West' is a western, and it's sort of a twist on the genre stylistically, I think, from what I understand going in.
Ben Mendelsohn
#13. Typically, I'll wake up at 4:30 in the morning. It's just the continual jet lag residue, just weird sleeping hours.
Ben Mendelsohn
#14. Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in the carnival, with carnie folks.
Ben Mendelsohn
#15. $3,000 from a residual cheque was all I made one year.
Ben Mendelsohn
#16. Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#17. You can certainly extend your adolescence. There's people that are very good at extending it indefinitely.
Ben Mendelsohn
#18. One of my earlier films is 'Quigley Down Under.' That was early on in my career, and that was horsey.
Ben Mendelsohn
#19. The way that actors talk about acting is generally quite punishing, and I think actors want to put forward the idea that they do all of this work because, you know, it's a post-De Niro world, when, largely, in fact, it's almost never true.
Ben Mendelsohn
#20. For me it's a compliment, playing baddie characters. I take it as a compliment.
Ben Mendelsohn
#21. My favorite-ever version of 'King Lear' is the 1971 film by Peter Brooks. He has this enormous fur thing, and it adds enormous gravitas.
Ben Mendelsohn
#22. There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.
Ben Mendelsohn
#24. I believe in the bible. I believe in the one true God. I believe he is the one true God because he's the only one that loved me enough to actually take action in my life.
Jacci Mendelsohn
#25. I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.
Ben Mendelsohn
#26. Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.
Ben Mendelsohn
#27. I don't know that it exists, the perfect family. It's always complicated.
Ben Mendelsohn
#28. I've spent various periods of my career being thought of as various things, various degrees of substance and ideas.
Ben Mendelsohn
#29. If you rush to take a drug, do so with the full knowledge that you are being a Guinea Pig. The longer a drug is on the market, the more will be known about the side effects.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#30. 'Star Wars' is populated by so many great types; who wouldn't want to be a Han Solo kind of dude?
Ben Mendelsohn
#31. An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#32. When you're a young boy, you're looking at older men for role modelling. Before I loved De Niro, I loved Clint Eastwood; I loved John Wayne. And James Bond.
Ben Mendelsohn
#33. 'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.
Ben Mendelsohn
#34. There are always dimensions, and the way they get expressed is through the writing and the actors and the director you get to work with on that day. But there are always dimensions, outside of really basic stuff for very young people where it needs to be very clear.
Ben Mendelsohn
#35. People don't know who I am, and that's not a bad thing at all from my end.
Ben Mendelsohn
#36. I got the first job and kept going. Once I got a job, I very much wanted to keep getting jobs, basically. I did try to learn what I could in those first couple of decades.
Ben Mendelsohn
#37. I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.
Ben Mendelsohn
#38. I like to call up ghosts of things past for myself when I'm working a lot.
Ben Mendelsohn
#39. If you've been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don't expect that you're going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like.
Ben Mendelsohn
#40. At 15 I had moved out of my parents' place, and my options were looking pretty narrow. But I had this acting thing and I just wanted to be able to keep going because it was really good. That was all I wanted.
Ben Mendelsohn
#41. You think of 'Outlaw Josey Wales,' you immediately think of the old Indian guy, Sondra Locke, the old lady with the glasses, beautiful old actress.
Ben Mendelsohn
#42. For a pediatrician to attack what has become the "bread and butter" of pediatric practice is equivalent to a priest denying the infallibility of the pope.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#43. There's very little different between the way the government operates in America and the way criminals do.
Ben Mendelsohn
#44. It's a tougher gig than what people think it is. The proper, real, genuine, worldwide movie stars don't get a lot of downtime from the world outside. That's a tougher price, I think, than what people's fantasy of fame account for.
Ben Mendelsohn
#45. It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.
Ben Mendelsohn
#47. One of the things that I found very confronting in my early working life was that people thought I was some sensitive doe-eyed lovelorn boy, because they'd seen me do that a couple of times. What tends to happen is you get a run of similar roles.
Ben Mendelsohn
#48. I don't have memorabilia but try to take a bit of wardrobe, usually because they dress me better than I dress myself.
Ben Mendelsohn
#49. You feel an affinity with younger actors, because, you know, it's a very insecure job. And it can be a long time before you feel like, you know, things might be all right.
Ben Mendelsohn
#50. ...I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#51. I was with my grandmother, while one of my brothers lived with my dad, and one lived with my mom. It wasn't a great situation. Acting was the one good thing I was involved in.
Ben Mendelsohn
#52. Most young actors, that's all they're trying to do: Get better at acting and be able to keep doing it. And that doesn't work out for most people.
Ben Mendelsohn
#53. If you're a 'character actor,' you get hired to play baddies a lot.
Ben Mendelsohn
#54. No one preached to me ... No one had to ... I wouldn't have listened anyway. I became a believer from a direct encounter with an answered prayer. I came face to face with God and all his power in a tiny bathroom in Washington.
Jacci Mendelsohn
#55. the Holocaust wasn't something that simply happened, but is an event that's still happening.)
Daniel Mendelsohn
#57. I think Kyle Chandler is something of a national treasure.
Ben Mendelsohn
#58. I generally feel like people that are doing the wardrobe know more about wardrobe than I do, and they have an overview.
Ben Mendelsohn
#59. 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' is one I watched again and again and again in the early days of VHS.
Ben Mendelsohn
#60. I think that story wins out over acting and that the thing as a whole is more important than the performances therein.
Ben Mendelsohn
#61. It's good to surf whatever waves are going on right there as they're happening.
Ben Mendelsohn
#62. For mine, the villains of the piece were always important. In a traditional sense, that's always an important role.
Ben Mendelsohn
#63. I never felt like someone who was boyish and coming to terms with asking girls out or anything like that, which was what 'The Big Steal' and 'Spotswood' were about. But I guess that's the impression I left on people.
Ben Mendelsohn
#64. I'm very well known in the industry and relatively well known by people who are aficionados and what not, but outside of that - no.
Ben Mendelsohn
#65. I had a pretty good career at home. What keeps you going is not having a plan B. It's a very good thing. I think if I had a viable plan B, I might not have kept going.
Ben Mendelsohn
#66. I'm very interested in the history of Christianity, and what I can say for sure is that the Catholics and the Jesuits and stuff were very big on teaching and on learning.
Ben Mendelsohn
#67. At night, I think about these things. I'm pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which now is gone forever.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#68. Before 'Animal Kingdom,' I wasn't particularly thought of in villainous roles.
Ben Mendelsohn
#69. I've been a Ryan Reynolds fan since the first time I saw him.
Ben Mendelsohn
#70. I wanted to keep working because work was essentially fantastic - you got to be around people, you got to be in a family, and that family changed from job to job. It was like being in the circus.
Ben Mendelsohn
#71. I think difficult characters are very rewarding to do. They often have facets to them and this and that.
Ben Mendelsohn
#72. If you ride like lightning, you're gonna crash like thunder.
Ben Mendelsohn
#73. I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.
Ben Mendelsohn
#74. In Australia, even the darkest subject matter has a little pinch of humor. A little sweet to make the sour go down.
Ben Mendelsohn
#75. Accents are always difficult in their way, but as long as you're not throwing an audience off with it, then that's all it should be.
Ben Mendelsohn
#76. The thing about acting is you have to wait to be asked to the dance.
Ben Mendelsohn
#77. The results of recent research on the impacts of climate change dramatically weaken the case for expensive, near-term abatement programs.
Robert O. Mendelsohn
#78. As an outsider in America, you do see the kind of hypocrisy that's rampant there.
Ben Mendelsohn
#79. My general feeling about approach to work is that anyone that's there, they're all there to do the best job they can.
Ben Mendelsohn
#80. The thing about home is that it's a tough place to sustain a career, just by dent of the size of the place. I had about as good a run there as anybody, but it's still a tough ask. I mean, the person I think with the best career in Australia is Ray Meagher, in 'Home and Away.'
Ben Mendelsohn
#81. The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation ... There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#82. There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There's the two really tangible things that can stay.
Ben Mendelsohn
#83. From my point of view, things don't have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.
Ben Mendelsohn
#84. In a very real sense, all you do when you're shooting film or television is you shoot a scene, and then you shoot another scene, and then you shoot another scene.
Ben Mendelsohn
#86. I think I've benefited from not being hugely known. It means I have to do something really effective to be noticed.
Ben Mendelsohn
#87. 'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming.
Ben Mendelsohn
#88. Fifteen years old, out in the world, acting was all I had.
Ben Mendelsohn
#89. To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#91. I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting.
Ben Mendelsohn
#92. The people that impress me are Bob Dylan. The ones who keep working, year in and year out, and keep coming up with stuff.
Ben Mendelsohn
#93. I did 'Quigley Down Under,' which is quite deliberately placed in Australia, which is a Tom Selleck, Alan Rickman, Laura San Giacomo film from '88, I want to say.
Ben Mendelsohn
#94. The first 'Star Wars' film was enormously important. I grew up right smack-bang in the sweet spot of all of those. It's true cinema magic. It's fair to say that, as a kid, I would have been very happy to be Han Solo, and I would have been happy to have gone out with Princess Leia.
Ben Mendelsohn
#95. Before you take the first dose of any medication your doctor prescribes, you should make it your business to find out more about the drug than the doctor himself knows.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#96. As an actor who has spent twenty years trying to crack America, the day I reached the 'Bloodline' set and found my name on a chair next to Sissy Spacek's was the happiest of my working life.
Ben Mendelsohn
#97. The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.
Daniel Mendelsohn
#98. I have an intensive relationship with the thing that I'm working on, and I hope that comes through. It's better for me to not worry about the things I can't fix once they're done.
Ben Mendelsohn
#99. I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns.
Ben Mendelsohn
#100. I remember 'The Yearling' was the first film I ever saw, and my mom told me I cried for about four or five days afterwards. I'd be going along during the day and suddenly start crying over what had happened to the little deer.
Ben Mendelsohn
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