Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

No, I was not born with a monocle in my eye.

The right partner in a film is equal to half the audience!

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad.

It was like a physical impact, something vital and quick, happening to us both. And I knew, from that moment, that whatever happened between us, we might disagree, get on each other’s nerves, quarrel, do...

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn’t until I began...

I was appalled at the amount of study necessary in order to qualify in medicine, and gradually my desire was blunted by a keener – and secret – wish to become an actor.

When I was in a play in a theater, and all was going well on stage, I felt that the audience and I were somehow joined into one.

Have you ever walked late at night through a forest when you are first in love?

An actor remembers his first piece of published praise. It is written on his heart.

I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness.

What use is there for a biography of myself? I’m just a movie actor.

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of...

It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into...

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down...

There must have been something in my nature – I believe, with all my heart, that I have conquered it now – which prevented me from being perfectly happy or making a woman perfectly happy.

So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just...

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed...

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the...

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition – and winning.

It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is...

The one thing I look for everywhere is beauty. I find it everywhere, and in almost every person. A lovely painting, a good book, or music moves me. It has a life of its own....

I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.

My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done...

I am indifferent if my spinach is leaf or creamed; if I work to fatiguing point or spend days doing nothing; if I smoke fifty cigarettes a day or none at all; if it rains...

I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself.

I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them.

I think, myself, it is harder for two artists, both ambitious, both temperamental, both perhaps egotistical, to jog along equably in the necessarily restraining atmosphere of a double harness.