Top 70 Dustin Hoffman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Humanity seized to exist when Israel was established.”

— Dustin Hoffman

2. “This is your life. Now go make it the one you’ve always wanted.”

— Dustin Hoffman

3. “Blame is for God and small children.”

— Dustin Hoffman

4. “I don’t believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but not hell.”

— Dustin Hoffman

5. “If you’re waiting for the job, you’re dead.”

— Dustin Hoffman

6. “We’re all a little nit autistic.”

— Dustin Hoffman

7. “I think ‘retirement’ goes hand in hand with people who make a living by having a ‘job.’ I don’t think we-the .00001 percent of the population who are so fortunate to love passionately what we do-consider it a ’job.”

— Dustin Hoffman

8. “There is something unnatural about marriage. These two people are not going to be the same people in a few years. The trick is to live your own life while sharing the same space.”

— Dustin Hoffman

9. “People like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity – and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves.”

— Dustin Hoffman

10. “I believe – though I may be wrong, because I’m no expert – that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil.”

— Dustin Hoffman

11. “I wanted to find my limitations so I decided to do Shylock. And if I fail? I’ve never been afraid of that. I have other fears – doing bad work knowingly is the worst fear.”

— Dustin Hoffman

12. “There’s a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don’t understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don’t understand boredom.”

— Dustin Hoffman

13. “If there is no direct threat why are we invading?”

— Dustin Hoffman

14. “I lived below the official American poverty line until I was 31.”

— Dustin Hoffman

15. “37 seconds, well used, is a lifetime.”

— Dustin Hoffman

16. “Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why.”

— Dustin Hoffman

17. “Depressed, anxious, sad, frightened? Yes. But I’ve never been bored.”

— Dustin Hoffman

18. “To have a successful marriage, a man must, on a fundamental level be scared shitless of his wife.”

— Dustin Hoffman

19. “I got into acting so that I could meet girls. Pretty girls came later. First, I wanted to start off with someone with two legs, who’d smile at me and look soft.”

— Dustin Hoffman

20. “I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been, and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been.”

— Dustin Hoffman

21. “There’s a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what’s the problem?”

— Dustin Hoffman

22. “Life stinks, but that doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy it.”

— Dustin Hoffman

23. “I love working, I’d be dead if I hadn’t found myself as an actor I didn’t have to be successful.”

— Dustin Hoffman

24. “My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I’ll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren.”

— Dustin Hoffman

25. “Harold, if you pause to think, you’d realize that, that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes.”

— Dustin Hoffman

26. “I did a movie called Marathon Man and it was one of my best memories.”

— Dustin Hoffman

27. “Acting didn’t solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I’m not. At least for me, acting is a relief – a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.”

— Dustin Hoffman

28. “Well first of all, it’s hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.”

— Dustin Hoffman

29. “I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I’d had before. I thought I’d just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.”

— Dustin Hoffman

30. “The truth is, I’ve made about 30 movies in 30 years, and I’ve been criticized for 30 years for not making more movies.”

— Dustin Hoffman

31. “I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in.”

— Dustin Hoffman

32. “Myth is supposed to bring us together, but fantasy alienates us.”

— Dustin Hoffman

33. “That’s what we’re all looking for, the place where the work leads us.”

— Dustin Hoffman

34. “I’m sixty-eight, I cry every chance I can.”

— Dustin Hoffman

35. “Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don’t like about directors. And sometimes they’re very similar.”

— Dustin Hoffman

36. “I knew I finally made it as a performer when I began hearing rumors that I was gay.”

— Dustin Hoffman

37. “Somehow I think it was declared very early on that I was the – if not the black sheep of the family, not a very good student.”

— Dustin Hoffman

38. “So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can’t imagine how they had high hopes for me.”

— Dustin Hoffman

39. “What makes divorce happen is that you can’t be in the same space any more, for whatever reason – but the love stays. And that’s the killer. That’s where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from.”

— Dustin Hoffman

40. “I decided to become an actor because I was failing in school and I needed the credits.”

— Dustin Hoffman

41. “But I would reinvent myself if I could. As a sexy leading man! We all would like that, but I don’t know how to.”

— Dustin Hoffman

42. “I mean, I don’t think I’m alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind’s eye. You don’t think they were cute like every other baby?”

— Dustin Hoffman

43. “The two basic items necessary to sustain life are sunshine and coconut milk.”

— Dustin Hoffman

44. “Look at the studio filled with glamorous merchandise. Fabulous and exciting bonus prizes. Thousands of dollars in cash. Over $150,000 just waiting to be won as we present our big bonanza of cash on Wheel Of Fortune.”

— Dustin Hoffman

45. “Next to that kid, we all look like onions.”

— Dustin Hoffman

46. “It’s true what they say about failure. You don’t learn from success.”

— Dustin Hoffman

47. “Money is another pressure. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that there’s a certain luxury in having no money. I spent ten years in New York not having it, not worrying about it. Suddenly you have it, then you worry, where is it going? Am I doing the right thing with it?”

— Dustin Hoffman

48. “I don’t like the fact that I have to get older so fast, but I like the fact that I’m aging so well.”

— Dustin Hoffman

49. “A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.”

— Dustin Hoffman

50. “Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It’s amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.”

— Dustin Hoffman