Quotes

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 them if I have a chance to look deep into their hearts and their minds. If I find there something, something worthwhile, some... some human kindness, some sympathy.

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

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

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

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

[on being typecast in villain roles] I find that, because of my language and gestures, that I am cataloged as what you call a heavy. My accent stamped me, in the imagination of the producers, as an enemy. Therefore, I must be a heavy.

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

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.

Never has a role so influenced and dominated an actor's role as has the role of Dracula. He [Dracula] has, at times, infused me with prosperity and, at other times, he has drained me of everything.

[on playing Dracula] It's a living, but it's also a curse. It's Dracula's curse.

If I had one per cent of the millions Dracula (1931) has made, I wouldn't be sitting here now.

[in response to an interviewer question "Doesn't Dracula ever end for you?"] No. No. Dracula never ends. I don't know if I should call it a fortune or a curse, but it never ends.

Look to Count Károlyi as Hungary's own Abraham Lincoln!

[asked about the Hungarian National Front of independence] The Hungarian underground really crystallizes the common denominator of resistance, which binds all the people who have felt the whiplash of fascism. Like the heroic people of France and Poland and Greece and Yugoslavia, the people of Hungary, the real Hungary, are fighting.

Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life. My next picture, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), will continue to establish me as a weird, gruesome creature. As for my own feelings on the subject, I have always felt I would rather play - say Percy Marmont roles than Lon Chaney types of roles.

I launched the struggle with the decision that the national trade union of socialist actors should be established.

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies, corrupted it morally and materially, and finally scorned and despised it for what resulted from its own vices. The actor, subsisting on starvation wages and demoralized, was often driven, albeit reluctantly, to place himself at the disposal of the ruling class. Martyrdom was the price of enthusiasm for acting.