Top 35 James Purefoy Quotes

When I was growing up, ‘Butch and Sundance‘ was my absolute favorite film.

If you read Grimm’s fairy tales, they’re absolutely terrifying.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd.

We always have relationships in our lives with people we’ve fallen in love with, who come back into our lives, and we fall in love with them again and go, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ but you can’t stop it.

The first time I was ever on stage, I was naked at 17. It was very cold!

When you don’t take what you have for granted, you constantly try to re-prove yourself to yourself rather than to other people.

I think the business affairs people at the studios get some kind of perverse satisfaction in finding the worst hotels for actors to stay in.

I think, as an actor, I would find it a little run-of-the-mill doing procedurals where it’s the same sort of thing week in and week out. Your character doesn’t get to grow very much, which, purely from an actor’s point of view, you want to see an arc of your character.

Violence is a very ugly thing. Violence is often so casual on film, and made to look so cool and so sexy, but violence is a repulsive, repugnant act that human beings inflict on each other. It shouldn’t seem to be cool and sexy, ever really.

I do know Joe Lansdale has the most extraordinary voice you’ve ever heard in your life in terms of an accent that, when I started doing it, they had to go, ‘Whoa, we need less.’ But that’s how he talks.

I have no problem with television as a genre.

I grew up in a very rural community in England.

All cult leaders are very good at supplying people with what they want and are missing in their lives, so they feel loved and that they belong.

I was very unmotivated at school.

You really need to learn how to turn it on for ‘action’ and off for ‘cut.’

I’m on record saying that HBO is the best television company in the world, and I believe they are. I think they absolutely understand how to make television that is really, really vital and interesting and visceral, and all the things that television really should be.

You know, people aren’t watching a network: they’re watching cable channels.

As you mature and gain a semblance of wisdom and a sense of what life is all about… this is by no means true of everyone, but a lot of actors like to escape themselves. Inhabiting another person’s persona is often a good way of escaping yourself.

I ran into my old friend Michael Kenneth Williams, who I worked with on a show called ‘The Philanthropist‘ for NBC. He was going to be doing this show called ‘Hap and Leonard.’ He was playing Leonard, and they were looking for somebody to play Hap.

One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

Decide very early on: do you want to be an actor or do you want to be famous? Because they’re very different routes.

I am not a big fan of what I call ‘ambient television,’ which just washes through you in a very polite way. I like television that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go.

When I started acting, I used to read all the reviews.

I have to travel a lot for work.

Somerset is where I call home, and where I feel most myself.

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

If you look around us, there are an awful lot of men out there, and women, but mostly men, who believe that they have got a fast-track path to Heaven, if they do the things that they believe God is telling them to do, and I don’t just mean Islamic people. I mean Fundamentalist Christians.

You were always told that if you worked hard, you would get somewhere. But so many people feel they have worked hard and they have nothing to show for it.

When you sign up for a show in the United States, it’s six or seven years, generally speaking.

I’m not a big fan of patterns. I like the unexpected.

Playing Mark Antony in ‘Rome‘ will always be a favourite of mine because he was such an outrageously big and interesting character to play. Also, the fact that we were able, with that character, to find out and present the public with a biography of that man that had not been really seen before.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you’re not happy then that’s probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am quite happy about it.

When you’re unhappy, you tend to play up, don’t you?

I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, ‘Rome,’ in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.

I’m a serial monogamist.