Bela Lugosi quotes:

I have never met a vampire personally, but I don't know what might happen tomorrow.

People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties... they live like ants.

My body grew hot, then cold. I tried to eat the bed sheets. My heart beat madly. Every joint in my body ached. When I took the cure they took it all away from me.

I studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts for four years and emerged with a degree.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

You can't make people believe in you if you play a horror part with your tongue in your cheek.

I don't have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.

In Hungary acting is a profession. In America it is a decision.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

The role seemed to demand that I keep myself worked up to fever pitch, so I took on the actual attributes of the horrible vampire, Dracula.

I'll be truthful. The weekly paycheck is the most important thing to me.

It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.

There was no male vampire type in existence. Someone suggested an actor of the Continental School who could play any type, and mentioned me.

In Hungary, acting is a profession. In America, it is a decision.

It took me years to live down Dracula and convince the film producers that I would play almost any other type of role.

It took several years of hard work in small roles before I attained stardom.

I guess I'm pretty much of a lone wolf. I don't say I don't like people at all, but, to tell you the truth, I only like it then if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds.

Every actor is somewhat mad, or else he'd be a plumber or a bookkeeper or a salesman.

I'd like to quit the supernatural roles and play just an interesting, down-to-earth person.

I have lived too completely, I think. I have known every human emotion.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

My close-up was magnificent!

I look in the mirror and say to myself, Can it be you once played Romeo?

If my accent betrayed my foreign birth, it also stamped me as an enemy, in the imagination of the producers.

The love-bite, it is the beginning. You will be irresistible.

The screen magnifies everything, even the way you are thinking.

I never play without my cape.

The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner.

Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

Death, the final, triumphant lover.

It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more.

To portray a maniac offers a compelling challenge.

To win a woman, take her with you to see Dracula.

In the studio the director controls the actor's every move, every inflection, every expression.

If you are not serious, people will sense it.

In making theories, always keep a window open so that you can throw one out if necessary.

Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified. In my case, that role was Dracula.

To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious.

I have lived too completely. I think I have known every human emotion.

It was hell to go through what I went through. I didn't know I had so many friends. Many people gave a damn about my situation. They helped cure me.

The vampire was a complete change from the usual romantic characters I was playing, but it was a success.

I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.

That is different, to have someone think that I am evil when I really am not.

Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.

Of all the roles I've done on the stage, I'm partial to Cyrano de Bergerac.

I've been using narcotics for 20 years.

Supernatural perhaps...baloney, perhaps not!

I enjoy my work. I haven't been an actor for 30 years without getting pleasure out of the profession.

A screen actor is compensated in the knowledge that millions will see his performance at one time, where only hundreds will see it on the stage.

I never drink... wine.

I will not be tortured, I tear torture out of myself by torturing you!

Without movie parts I was reduced to freak status. I just couldn't stand it.

Every producer in Hollywood had set me down as a type. I was both amused and disappointed. Bela Lugosi.

I'll take any story if it's good.

Martyrdom was the price of enthusiasm for acting.

When a film company is in the red they come to me. Always it is the same.

The stage is near and dear to me.