Quotes By Ben Kingsley

I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.

The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work.

Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.

There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.

With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do.

There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There's never been a trough of my assurance.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

There's so much crap talked about acting.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.