167 Quotes by Hugh Grant

For a few years, I thought I was putting show business behind me. I was busy doing other things in life, particularly with politics. I was not out looking for films, really. I lost interest.

I'm a terrible actor. I'm still learning. When I first started, I wish I knew then to trust myself more, really. I was in a terrible panic in the early part of my career.

I suppose after 'Four Weddings' I was very busy for a bit, and I imagined that was my career, but I never had that thing of, 'I'm burning to be an actor. If I don't act, I'm not alive.' I've never had that.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

If you do too much acting in a lead part in a feature film where you're 40 ft. high, it's rather unattractive. You can see the acting. And it's actually the right thing to do to bring as much of yourself, I believe, to the part as you possibly can - to minimize the amount of theatrical stuff that you need to do.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of acting: character acting and lead acting. And in my life, to begin with, in the 1980s, it was all character acting. And then when, by fluke, through 'Four Weddings', I got into doing lead parts, it's a completely different thing.

A lot of actors look at scripts and think, 'How will this stretch me as an actor?' But I always thought, 'Do I want to turn the page? Is this going to make people laugh?'

Comedy is probably a way of dealing with anxiety. Sometimes it's a way of dealing with pain.

There was a phase in my career in my late 20s and 30s when I was doing strange, arty-farty Euro films that were, you could tell, never had much chance of any release anywhere in the world.