Kirk Douglas Quotes

In order to achieve anything,you must be brave enough to fail.

I told him that the lawyers were always saying 'You can't say that you'll get sued.' He said to me, 'Write fiction Michael, you can tell the truth.' (Kirk Douglas to Michael Caine)

Life is like a B-picture script.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took his own life, thinking he was a failure. How terrible to paint pictures and feel that no one wants them. How awful it would be to write music that no one wants to hear. Books that no one wants to read. And how would you like to be an actor with no part to play, and no audience to watch you. Poor Vincent—he wrestled with his soul in the wheat field of Auvers-sur-Oise, stacks of his unsold paintings collecting dust in his brother's house. It was all too much for him, and he pulled the trigger and ended it all. My heart ached for van Gogh the afternoon that I played that scene. As I write this, I look up at a poster of his "Irises"—a poster from the Getty Museum. It's a beautiful piece of art with one white iris sticking up among a field of blue ones. They paid a fortune for it, reportedly $53 million. And poor Vincent, in his lifetime, sold only one painting for 400 francs or $80 dollars today. This is what stimulated my interest in buying works of art from living artists. I want them to know while they are alive that I enjoy their paintings hanging on my walls, or their sculptures decorating my garden

So they became superpatriots. And to prove themselves right-minded, they were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others, even their fellow Jews. They were like the Vichy government in France, collaborators who held on to their influence and position at the expense of their fellow countrymen.

The biggest lie is the lie we tell ourselves in the distorted visions we have of ourselves, blocking out some sections, enhancing others. What remains are not the cold facts of life, but how we perceive them. That's really who we are.

I believe I will see my mother again. I expect to again hear those familiar words, 'Oh, Honey, I'm so glad you've come.' I am not alone in entertaining such thoughts. When Kirk Douglas was hospitalized after a massive stroke, he wondered, 'Could I see my mother again? I would like that.' I have read and reread his words, 'Oh, how I would like to thank her for all of the things that I never thanked her for.' Just as my mother took my hand as a child and led me on the big adventure of exploring downtown Louisville, on some distant day, she will again take my hand, and lead me on the big adventure of exploring heaven. In the language of the Eternal Town I will, at last, find adequate words to thank her for loving me so lavishly.

Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.

But truth is like the coyote. No matter how much society is bent on its destruction, it somehow always manages to survive, usually sneaking around the edges of civilization to avoid detection.

I believe much of the divisiveness in the world has been caused by religion, even in the time of Spartacus when they worshipped many gods. What is the purpose of religion? After ninety-five years on this planet, I have come to the conclusion that religion should be based on only one thing: helping your fellow man. If everybody followed that religion—helping his fellow man—armies would vanish overnight.

Ogling Douglas' wife, who looked trampily deep into bipolar meds & high-end anti-aging crêmes, Jerzy thought: Now that is a hot fuck. He wondered if Douglas got his C by being wayback viral throatstroked by papilloma.....seems like a person would have to go down on a boatload of broads to get HPV in the gullet (well, do the math), if the actor scarfed half as much pussy as dimpled dad kirk-King Leer, Kirk the lyin' King-then he just might have qualified.

There were two sets of similar people arriving in Chicago and other industrial cities of the North at around the same time in the early decades of the twentieth century—blacks pouring in from the South and immigrants arriving from eastern and southern Europe in a slowing but continuous stream from across the Atlantic, a pilgrimage that had begun in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On the face of it, they were sociologically alike, mostly landless rural people, put upon by the landed upper classes or harsh autocratic regimes, seeking freedom and autonomy in the northern factory cities of the United States. But as they made their way into the economies of Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other receiving cities, their fortunes diverged. Both groups found themselves ridiculed for their folk ways and accents and suffered backward assumptions about their abilities and intelligence. But with the stroke of a pen, many eastern and southern Europeans and their children could wipe away their ethnicities—and those limiting assumptions—by adopting Anglo-Saxon surnames and melting into the world of the more privileged native-born whites. In this way, generations of immigrant children could take their places without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Doris von Kappelhoff could become Doris Day, and Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of as Michael Danielovitch. ... Ultimately, according to the Harvard immigration scholar Stanley Lieberson, a major difference between the acceptance and thus life outcomes of black migrants from the South and their white immigrant counterparts was this: white immigrants and their descendants could escape the disadvantages of their station if they chose to, while that option did not hold for the vast majority of black migrants and their children. The ethnicity of the descendants of white immigrants “was more a matter of choice, because, with some effort, it could be changed,” Lieberson wrote, and, out in public, might not easily be determined at all.

When we gather in family worship, we are not setting aside God’s portion of the day, but are reminding the entire family that the entire day is His.

In short, we would continue to be the kind of human beings a writer could work with, could understand. James T. Kirk might have lived hundreds of years in the future, might have beamed down to planets and engaged warp engines, but viewers still had no trouble relating to him. He was adventurous, loyal, and heroic, and he lusted after life (along with green aliens, androids, and just about anything else that could move).  But what if you believe that in a few hundred years, people will not be the same as today? What if you believe they will be so different they will be unrecognizable as human? Now how would you write science fiction? You would have to change two variables at the same time: not only addressing dramatic advances in technology, but dramatic changes in the nature of humanity itself (or, more likely, the merger of our technology and ourselves). In the early days of science fiction, technology changed at a snail’s pace. But today, technological change is so furious, so obviously exponential, that it is impossible to ignore. I have no doubt this is why a once fringe, disrespected genre has become so widely popular, has come out of the closet, and is now so all-pervasive in our society. Because we’re living science fiction every day. Rapid and transformative technological change isn’t hard to imagine anymore. What’s hard to imagine is the lack of such change. In 1880, the US asked a group of experts to analyze New York City, one of the fastest-growing cities in North America. They wanted to know what it might be like in a hundred years.

The experts extrapolated the likely growth during this period, and the expected consequences. They then confidently proclaimed that if population growth wasn’t halted, by 1980, New York City would require so many horses to stay viable that every inch of it would be knee-deep in manure. Knee-deep! In horse manure! As someone interested in technology and future trends, I love this story, even if it turns out to be apocryphal, because it does a brilliant job of highlighting the dangers of extrapolating the future, since we aren’t capable of foreseeing game-changing technologies that often appear. Even now. Even at our level of sophistication and expectation of change. But while we can’t know what miracles the future will hold, we’ve now seen too much evidence of exponential progress not to know that Jim Kirk would no longer be relatable to us. Because it seems impossible to me that we will remain as we are. Remain even the least bit recognizable. This assumes, of course, that we avoid self-destruction, a fate that seems more likely every day as WMDs proliferate and fanaticism grows. But post-apocalyptic science fiction has never been my thing, and if we do reach a Star Trek level of technology, we will have avoided self-destruction, by definition. And I prefer to be optimistic, in any case, despite the growing case for pessimism. So if we do ever advance to the point at which we can travel through hyperspace, beam ourselves down to planets, or wage war in great starships, we can be sure we won’t be human anymore

Because what would you rather read about: a swashbuckling starship captain? Or a being as incomprehensible to us as we are to an amoeba? To be fair, science fiction novels have been written about a future in which this transformation has occurred. And I could write one of these, as well. The problem is that for the most part, people like reading about other people. People who are like them. People who act and think like, you know . . . people. Even if we imagine a future society of omniscient beings, we wouldn’t have much of a story without conflict. Without passions and frailties and fear of death. And what kind of a story could an amoeba write about a man, anyway? I believe that after a few hundred years of riding up this hockey-stick of explosive technological growth, humanity can forge a utopian society whose citizens are nearly-omniscient and nearly-immortal. Governed by pure reason rather than petty human emotions. A society in which unrecognizable beings live in harmony, not driven by current human limitations and motivations. Wow. A novel about beings we can’t possibly relate to, residing on an intellectual plane of existence incomprehensible to us, without conflict or malice. I think I may have just described the most boring novel ever written. Despite what I believe to be true about the future, however, I have to admit something: I still can’t help myself. I love space opera. When the next Star Trek movie comes out, I’ll be the first one in line. Even though I’ll still believe that if our technology advances enough for starships, it will have advanced enough for us to have utterly transformed ourselves, as well. With apologies to Captain Kirk and his crew, Star Trek technology would never coexist with a humanity we can hope to understand, much as dinosaurs and people really didn’t roam the earth at the same time. But all of this being said, as a reader and viewer, I find it easy to suspend disbelief. Because I really, really love this stuff. As a writer, though, it is more difficult for me to turn a blind eye to what I believe will be the truth. But, hey, I’m only human. A current human. With all kinds of flaws. So maybe I can rationalize ignoring my beliefs long enough to write a rip-roaring science fiction adventure. I mean, it is fiction, right? And maybe dinosaurs and mankind did coexist. The Flintstones wouldn’t lie, would they?  So while the mind-blowing pace of scientific progress has ruined far-future science fiction for me, at least when it comes to the writing of it, I may not be able to help myself. I may love old-school science fiction too much to limit myself to near-future thrillers. One day, I may break down, fall off the wagon, and do what I vowed during my last Futurists Anonymous meeting never to do again: write far-future science fiction.  And if that day ever comes, all I ask is that you not judge me too harshly.

All this only proves that you don't have to be a nice person to be extremely talented. You can be a shit and be talented and, conversely, you can be the nicest guy in the world and not have any talent. Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit.

The eye of the movie camera is an evil eye. When you act in front of it, that cyclops keeps taking from you, until you feel empty. On the stage, you give something to the audience, more comes back. When the curtain comes down in a theater, you have a feeling of exhilaration - something's been completed, fulfilled. It's so different from an exhausting day of shooting at the studio. You come home tired, drained. Making a =movie is like making a mosaic - laboriously putting little pieces together, jumping from one part of the picture to another, never seeing the whole, whereas in a ply, the momentum of the continuity works with you, takes you along. Doing a play is like dancing to music. Making a movie is like dancing in wet cement.

The definition of an actor - someone who loves rejection.

We both fell in love -- with me.

Less than two weeks after his departure from Canton, Bob Irwin would go from utter obscurity to nationwide notoriety. Izzy Demsky would always remember that tumultuous time in the life of the normally sleepy little college town. Twenty years later—long after he had changed his name to Kirk Douglas and achieved his own, far greater renown as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars—he would conjure up memories of his old college friend while making Lust for Life, the biopic of Vincent van Gogh that earned Douglas one of his three Best Actor Oscar nominations. “I felt sorry for him, a talented artist at the mercy of incomprehensible forces,” Douglas would write. “When I thought of Van Gogh, I thought of Bob Irwin.”7

Frequent Pierre guests included Aristotle Onassis, the Prince of Wales, the king and queen of Greece, Crown Prince Philip, Kirk Douglas, and Katharine Hepburn.

Kirk Douglas had engineered his social life with the cynical goal of meeting the rich and powerful, he would have ignored this Lauren Bacall. But so cynical and narrow-focused an approach isn’t likely to produce good luck. The lucky personality gets to know everybody in sight: the rich and the poor, the famous the humble, the sociable and even the friendless and the cranky.

Only a life lived for others is worth living.

Remembrance of my mother’s love changes my veil to gossamer threads. An anti-Semitic slur causes the veil to press against me. Sometimes a happy thought can make me jump for joy, but I must be careful; if I jump too high, I’ll bump into the veil. It doesn’t hurt, but it always tinges my joy with sadness.

The colonel blew out a long breath. “I was here for about an hour before you awoke. And as I was studying your file and gazing upon a beaten, wayward soul with staggering potential, I was struck by the uncanny similarities between you and the young James T. Kirk. From the reboot movie.” Eric made a face. “The psych ward is on another floor, Colonel.” Thomison laughed. “Very good. I deserved that. But let me elaborate. The movie hit theaters in 2009, when you were only five. I take it you’ve never streamed it.” “Good guess.” “Then you missed out. Not only did you remind me of that Kirk when I got here, but I realized I was about to recreate my favorite scene from the movie. So I’ll make you a deal. I’m convinced you can make a mark. One more profound than you can imagine right now. Be a bigger hero even than your father. You were destined for greatness, and that got derailed. But you can still arrive there by a different route. So watch about ten minutes of the movie. The opening scene and then a scene a little later. If you do that, and still want me gone, you’ll never see me again.” “You’re kidding, right? What, will I be hypnotized?” “No. But I think you’ll be moved. It’s a reboot, so the timeline differs from the original, while keeping key elements. In this version, James T. Kirk is about to be born on the starship Kelvin while his father is the first officer. That’s when an unstoppable Romulan ship from the future travels back through time and alters the timeline forever.” The colonel paused. “Watch ten minutes. That’s all I ask.” Eric thought about this for a moment and sighed. “It won’t

Anne and I met him at the beach in the south of France. Anne asked him to autograph a Chagall book that had one of his paintings in the middle of a page. He took the book home and brought it back the next morning. He had extended the copy of the painting to fill the entire page and signed it to me. It hangs on my wall near the bookshelf.

without the burdens of an outsider ethnicity in a less enlightened era. Doris von Kappelhoff could become Doris Day, and Issur Danielovitch, the son of immigrants from Belarus, could become Kirk Douglas, meaning that his son could live life and pursue stardom as Michael Douglas instead of as Michael Danielovitch.