10 Quotes by Erland Josephson

I can remember the moment when I suddenly felt that the camera was a living partner. I suddenly felt this is art, and the camera is a co-operative living person. After that I was extremely happy to act in films.

I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me. If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free, I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well.

A man obsessed with failure has succeeded better than others in portraying it.

Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!

I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.

Acting has a strong sensual quality that I get such a... you say 'kick' in America? It's a fantastic profession in that way.

I very often get that question: 'What is your real profession?' That's because in Sweden, it is 'not allowed' to have more than one profession - there's something suspicious about it! But nowadays it's more accepted that one can do a lot of things.

I was mainly a stage actor. I found film acting mechanical, because it was so technical - there was so much technique with the lamps and the movements of the camera.

In Bergman's world I represented a sort of intellectual, skeptical, ironic person, rather cold and frustrated. When I went abroad and made films in Italy and other places, I was used in different ways. I was rather often cast as crazy people, maniacs. It was very good for me and it was fun because it is nice to play crazy people if you are not in reality. And I think perhaps that changed how Ingmar saw me. Suddenly I was on the more magical side of his world, playing the people with fantasies, variety, the artists.