Peter Lorre Quotes

Making movies used to be fun in the old days. It isn’t any longer. It’s a coldhearted business.

I wouldn’t mind doing those sinister roles again, but in pictures I will direct myself.

Interviews are horrible. All your life you are trained not to talk about yourself. Then you are expected to do nothing else, to talk only of yourself.

I couldn’t live without acting. In fact anybody who can live without that feeling is a complete idiot.

I don’t want to be typed as a villain or a comedian. One would be as bad as the other. I had to fight that sort of thing several times in my life. And it’s painful because it consists of turning down money to do a role.

I’ve never seen myself on the screen.

Sydney and I made so many pictures together we were becoming Abbott and Costello, so we broke up. You know Greenstreet was a comedian before he played ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and in that picture his dialogue consisted of seven pages in a row which he memorized weeks ahead.

I’m not scaring anybody for no money!

Some people think I was in movies I’ve never been in.

I can’t stand to live in Europe. And New York isn’t much better.

It got so that I couldn’t play anything but a Peter Lorre character.

It’s sort of sad, but the public is no longer afraid of ghosts. They laugh at them instead.

Actually I made only one out-and-out horror picture, ‘The Beast with Five Fingers,’ though I have done a lot of suspense and mystery films, of course.

You’d be amazed how people love me.

I can’t understand why I am always being called a ‘boogie-man’ type of actor.

My family encouraged me to paint, but I was never allowed to go to the theater. Naturally, this made me interested in the theater.

I don’t want to brag, but I can make people laugh and then be terrified.

The audience loves me.

I have made over 70 pictures and in only 10 of them did I portray a really ‘bad man.’

There is really no such thing as terrifying people. It’s the situation and the scene that count. Not the actor.

People call me Pepe Le Moko. I never played that role.

Just memorizing and emoting, for that you get paid. But that isn’t acting.

For the type of parts I play, I should be booed. But it’s odd, fans just adore me. I can’t explain it.

I’m a shy man.

For money, I can be a nice guy.

In New York I was taken to a restaurant where comedians gather. There were 14 who imitate me in their acts. They wanted me to give them pointers.

Everybody has to work with their talent.

I’m easy to imitate. All you need are the soft-boiled egg eyes and the bedroom voice.

Despite the fact Hollywood classes me as a ‘type,’ I find the roles broad enough to handle all the acting technique I can summon together.

Terrible letters came to me. Letters from strange people; people whom I never believed lived in the world; depraved and distorted minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic.