Prot-a-gonist* Awake the Dark Unconscious | Vincent Price, 1911-1993
“A man who limits his interests limits his life.”
“Most people think that college is the end of education, but it isn’t. The ceremony of giving you
the diploma is called commencement. And that means you are fit to commence learning
because you have learned how to learn.”
“In order to get out of the dumps, there are many steps to walk up, and most of the
ones I know of, not only for myself but others, are made of money.”
“The main thing in life is survival. And survival is not just staying alive.
It is also a constant effort to grow and to learn and to work.”
William Castle, House on Haunted Hill, 1955
“ The half-open door is often more exciting than the wide.”
“What’s important about an actor is his acting, not his life.”
“If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as
much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore
are when we don’t care one way or another.”
“I sometimes feel that I’m impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race.”
“I don’t play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge.”
“It’s as much fun to scare as to be scared.”
“I open a Bible in a hotel room, hoping for some great happenstance spiritual word
of advice. More often than not, I hit a long passage of begats and begots, which
contain little inspiration other than the fact that procreation is the highest aim of life.”
“Do you ever rub your eyes and suddenly find you’re awake
and not asleep, as you’d grown to suspect you were?”
“We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the
unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.”
“I’m extremely profane, unconsciously so, when I see something great for the first time;
I don’t know why, but beauty and profanity are related to me in the same way. ”
“No one but Gene Tierney could have played ‘Laura.’ There was no other actress
around with her particular combination of beauty, breeding, and mystery.”
Gene Tierney and Vincent Price / Otto Preminger, Laura, 1944
“To miss the sensation of loving art is to miss a kind of parenthood—false pregnancy
perhaps—but as Van Gogh said, “If, defrauded of the power to create physically, a man
tries to create thoughts in place of children, he is still part of humanity”…a big part.”
“The arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge,
and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom.”
“Well, what do you owe yourself? Do you dare take time out to listen to the grass
grow, or can you even afford the expense of getting far enough away from life’s
daily cacophony to hear it grow if you took the time?”
“There comes a time in life when you know what you like and have to make up
your mind to like what you know, or at least have begun to know.”
“Be curious about life, and cautious with it!”
Vincent Price, 1911-93