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Quotes by Ben Kingsley

Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting.
– Ben Kingsley
Sometimes, you know, one is distracted by a bad print or a bad sound quality.
– Ben Kingsley
Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.
– Ben Kingsley
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
– Ben Kingsley
The astonishing silences in a Tarkovsky film... can sweep you into screen and... you don't want to end.
– Ben Kingsley
The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!
– Ben Kingsley
The close up in any great film is also telling the audience exactly where that character is. So you see it's very cinematographic stuff. Shakespeare lends itself so beautifully to film.
– Ben Kingsley
The Dostoevsky in Russia is very alive.
– Ben Kingsley
The greatest irony is that I changed my name from Krishna Bhanji to Ben Kingsley in order to play Mahatma Gandhi. That is an extraordinary irony. However, that was my birth name because my grandparents on my father's side actually came from Gujurat.
– Ben Kingsley
The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.
– Ben Kingsley
The integrity of the moment... it is going to be scrutinised as a piece of narrative drama for as long as that film or DVD or mechanical recording lasts... you are committing yourself, in those moments, the possibility of being heard by your great great great grandchildren.
– Ben Kingsley
The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.
– Ben Kingsley
The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.
– Ben Kingsley
The random alchemy of my career was that it was in the stars that I was to audition for Trevor Nunn, and he invited me into his Royal Shakespeare Company. Therefore, in the late '60s and early '70s, through Trevor, Peter Brook, Buzz Goodbody, through the great directors I worked with and the great roles I was privileged to play, that was my home, my education, my parent, my friend. That company was everything to me.
– Ben Kingsley
The title is the equivalent of when you become a doctor after years of medical school training... I suppose after years of chewing up the furniture and scenery on stage and in films I get to Sir for being a thespian.
– Ben Kingsley
The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
– Ben Kingsley
There are other non-English, Asian, Mexican... many, many directors I'd love to work with of different nationalities because a different national temperament and a different rhythm and a different way of looking at things is enlightening to work with.
– Ben Kingsley
There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There's never been a trough of my assurance.
– Ben Kingsley
There is a lot of creative energy in me right now. In the work I'm now doing, I know that my soul-my soul-is fully articulate.
– Ben Kingsley
There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.
– Ben Kingsley
There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.
– Ben Kingsley
There's always a part of me that's migrating. That's so much part of my attempt to portray all these different men. The sense of being displaced from my home, homeland and language is a very real part of my working life.
– Ben Kingsley
There's nothing worse than taking your children to a bad pantomime where they are having more fun on stage than the kids are in the audience. It's insulting, it's demeaning, it's excluding.
– Ben Kingsley
There's probably a young director, male or female, out there somewhere, I don't even know their names, but maybe I'm destined to work with them, and we'll have an extraordinary relationship. I would love to work with Claire Denis because I think she's extraordinary.
– Ben Kingsley
There's so much crap talked about acting.
– Ben Kingsley
To be moved is beautiful. We don't go to the cinema to leave in exactly the same state that we were in when we walked in. We buy our ticket, we pay our seven or eight dollars to be moved. That's honestly what we pay for.
– Ben Kingsley
To offer to our tribe, as storytellers, narratives which are absent of a dark side is a terrible disservice. I'm just fighting for the right for a film to be stirring and brilliant and illuminating.
– Ben Kingsley
Unfortunately I went to a hotel in Krakow, and unfortunately, one night, there was a brawl in the bar because a horrible anti-Semitic remark was made to one of my fellow Israeli actors, one of my fellow actors who was an Israeli, sorry, and we were all extremely upset. I reacted rather violently, I'm afraid.
– Ben Kingsley
W.C. Fields was completely wrong, because with children, they have a spontaneity, they have a purity, they have a morality and they have an ethical approach to things and a curiosity that is utterly, utterly refreshing and reminds me of my first days in the theater and reminds me of why I'm an actor in the first place. W.C. Fields was very, very wrong, but then he was probably drunk at the time.
– Ben Kingsley
We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they're good actors.
– Ben Kingsley
Well, it's wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.
– Ben Kingsley
What we have in Shakespeare is a very, very early form of device which today in screenplay is the BCU-big close up.
– Ben Kingsley
When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.
– Ben Kingsley
When I choose a role it's either because I recognise the man, or that I'm very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don't play him.
– Ben Kingsley
When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.
– Ben Kingsley
With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do.
– Ben Kingsley