Top 80 Ben Kingsley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The biggest surprise in a man’s life is old age.”

— Ben Kingsley

2. “Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.”

— Ben Kingsley

3. “Equal partners aren’t always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.”

— Ben Kingsley

4. “I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That’s how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other.”

— Ben Kingsley

5. “I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I’m waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.”

— Ben Kingsley

6. “I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities.”

— Ben Kingsley

7. “If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.”

— Ben Kingsley

8. “Sometimes it’s right to do the wrong things and right now is one of those times.”

— Ben Kingsley

9. “I never read anything in print about me. It started with not reading reviews and with the greatest respect to my publicist here, I never read interviews. I was there when I gave them. I never read reviews. I was there when I did the jobs – so I’m totally immune. I live in a bubble.”

— Ben Kingsley

10. “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

11. “If you are a libertine, if you’re not given to long-term faithful relationships, you tend to project your behavior onto everyone else. It’s like the person who knows they’re not trustworthy; they tend to mistrust everyone else.”

— Ben Kingsley

12. “One of the greatest things drama can do, at it’s best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.”

— Ben Kingsley

13. “In England, it’s now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It’s not even on my passport anymore. They’ve taken Mister away from me.”

— Ben Kingsley

14. “What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.”

— Ben Kingsley

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15. “I hope I’m able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I’m reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That’s what I’d like to do.”

— Ben Kingsley

16. “John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.”

— Ben Kingsley

17. “All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.”

— Ben Kingsley

18. “I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.”

— Ben Kingsley

19. “If it’s a really well written villain, he probably has more layers than the archetypal good person. So that would be very attractive to an actor. No one chooses to be a villain; it’s usually a reaction to something else.”

— Ben Kingsley

20. “As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I’d still be alive by now.”

— Ben Kingsley

21. “I’m convinced that had I not changed my name, I don’t think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.”

— Ben Kingsley

22. “When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.”

— Ben Kingsley

23. “Family is family over the internet, over Skype, over the telephone. Love is love. You don’t have to actually go through some ritual to prove that you love somebody.”

— Ben Kingsley

24. “I’m very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.”

— Ben Kingsley

25. “There’s so much crap talked about acting.”

— Ben Kingsley

26. “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

27. “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

28. “You don’t go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that’s benign conquest. It’s a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.”

— Ben Kingsley

29. “If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.”

— Ben Kingsley

30. “I’ve never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I’m deeply fortunate.”

— Ben Kingsley

31. “I didn’t go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey.”

— Ben Kingsley

32. “We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they’re good actors.”

— Ben Kingsley

33. “You cannot learn a lesson of profound forgiveness unless you understand what it is to be wounded and forgive that which has wounded you.”

— Ben Kingsley

34. “I want to play a man in uniform. I’ve got tremendous respect for that life that they lead. We know so little about it. It’s never discussed or talked about, when they come back from battle. I want to examine the choices that have to be made in some terrible times. I’ll get to wear a uniform.”

— Ben Kingsley

35. “I have never felt bereft of anything.”

— Ben Kingsley

36. “Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn’t there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can’t.”

— Ben Kingsley

37. “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

38. “My line-learning is very special. I like to learn the dialogue of the whole film before I arrive.”

— Ben Kingsley

39. “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

40. “In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn’t care what the audience think of you. That’s not why you are there. You mustn’t care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.”

— Ben Kingsley

41. “I don’t honestly think people know what acting is.”

— Ben Kingsley

42. “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

43. “If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.”

— Ben Kingsley

44. “The leaping Jaguar on the bonnet, to me, makes it look more like a hunter than something that is getting away. It’s a hunter. Richard III definitely would have had a chauffeur driven Jaguar MK X.”

— Ben Kingsley

45. “I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.”

— Ben Kingsley

46. “There are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.”

— Ben Kingsley

47. “Millions of children are disempowered and we need to empower them.”

— Ben Kingsley

48. “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

49. “I’ve met quite a number of people in my career, but I do have an extraordinary memory. And even though they may drift into the periphery of my memory, I can bring them right back when I need them.”

— Ben Kingsley

50. “Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn’t going to work.”

— Ben Kingsley