James Cagney Quotes

30 quotes in 426 categories

• Perhaps people, and kids especially, are spoiled today, because all the kids today have cars, it seems. When I was young you were lucky to…
• I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn't really approve of…
• My childhood was surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad's alcoholism, but as I said, we just didn't have the time to be impressed by…
• I`m sick of carrying guns and beating up women.
• There's not much to say about acting but this. Never settle back on your heels. Never relax. If you relax, the audience relaxes. And always…
• I never said, 'MMMmmm, you dirty rat!
• I never had the slightest difficulty with a fellow actor. Not until One, Two, Three. In that picture, Horst Buchholz tried all sorts of scene-stealing…
• You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made…
• You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly…
• Once a song and dance man, always a song and dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to…
• Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth.
• You dirty, double-crossing rat.
• Absorption in things other than self is the secret of a happy life.
• Outside of my family, the prime concern of my life has been nature and its order, and how we have been savagely altering that order.
• Learn your lines… plant your feet… look the other actor in the eye… say the words… mean them.
• My father was totally Irish, and so I went to Ireland once. I found it to be very much like New York, for it was…
• Though I soon became typecast in Hollywood as a gangster and hoodlum, I was originally a dancer, an Irish hoofer, trained in vaudeville tap dance.…
• All I try to do is to realize the man I'm playing fully, then put as much into my acting as I know how. To…
• My biggest concern is that doing a rough-and-tumble scene I might hurt someone accidentally.
• In this business you need enthusiasm. I don't have enthusiasm for acting anymore. Acting is not the beginning and end of everything.

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