Hal Holbrook Quotes & Trivia



Quotes

Crazy terrorism by religious fanatics, Mark Twain called the wildcat religious tribes.

I decided to go for the heavy stuff, give the audience the toughest stuff I could. And I did it.

I developed a resistance to authority. Not to discipline-I learned that. But to authority. I like to think for myself. And I like to cause trouble.

I didn't have much of a family. My mother and father left when I was 2. My two sisters and I were raised by my grandfather in New England.

I do not write Mark Twain. That's impossible.

I don't get bored. I get angry and want to get out there and talk about things.

I don't have a director. The audience directs me.

I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.

I had to learn to survive. I learned to survive in boy's schools. I didn't have much home.

I have a suicide impulse.

I have this magnificent voice to talk with.

I just want to jump off the high board.

I learned long ago that the most dangerous thing I could do was think of myself as being as Mark Twain. Once you think you're Lincoln, you're dead. I'll always think of myself as an actor doing Twain.

I like to be who I am.

I research the material myself. I go through books and edit it down. When you put literary material on the stage, and wrote about it, you have to slim it down.

I said, I can't cut Huckleberry Finn. That's Mark Twain's masterpiece. What he has to say is important.

I wanted to go around the world. I started, but we got as far as New Zealand. I decided to go back, 'cause by then you either have to go all the way or come back.

I was scared all the time when I was acting.

I was scared to death all the time, to about 14 years ago, when I finally said, The hell with it, and stopped being scared.

I was sent away to school when I was 7, to another state. I was beat up a lot when I was a little kid.

I was the guinea pig at Oxford, Mississippi back in 1962.

I wish I could have been a better father when my children were growing up, and less frightened about my own future, and how I was going to make a living, so I could have spent more real attention on them.

I wish I could wipe out the hurt that I've caused other people in my life.

I'd like to throw overboard all my past mistakes, of which I have made a multitude.

I've been doing this thing 50 years. when people listen to what I'm doing, they understand.

I've gotten older and more irritated by what I see going on in this society, in this world in which I live.

Like 9-11, I want to construct something that seems important. Just leave the name of the war out, leave the name of the President out.

Man is the religious animal. He is the only one that's got true religion, several of them.

Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.

Mark Twain cannot be defined.

Mark Twain had hidden a lot. His wife was probably not enamored of this kind of thinking. But it was there and it haunted him all the time.

My wife and I love to prune trees. I love trees. As I've grown older, I've fallen in love with trees. I'm in now on the road, and I walk around in the parking lot and look at trees.

One of the problems with putting Huck Finn into a movie or on the stage is, you always make the white people stupid and racist. The point is, they don't know they're racist.

There's no good guys and bad guys.

To communicate with each other, we got to get mad at each other sometimes.

To understand people on the stage or in a motion picture, you have to have human beings. You can't have cardboard people.

Twain also said, the human race is a race of cowards. And I am not only marching in that procession, I am carrying a banner. I try to remember that.

We don't have truth delivered to us very often, especially in this very commercialized world.

We have a rule on the boat; you always know where the knife is. You never put anything back in a different place.

We live in a democracy. We have this extraordinary opportunity to use our mind and say what we think, speak as we think. Sometimes what we say is objectionable to other people. But that is part of a free society.

When I see a young actor today doing a good job, I tell him. When I look at some of the things I did years ago that I didn't think were very good, I look at it now and think, You were good. But nobody told me.

When you get into corporate decision-making, especially in these days of political correctness, you are in jail.

You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.

You have to learn not to fight nature. You have to learn to give to nature just enough to stay alive.

You have to understand what human beings really were. You cannot understand the past without acknowledging the humanity of people who lived 100, 150 years ago.

You think about getting somewhere, hoping you get where you're going. You think, is everything working right? You double check, you triple check.