Top 50 Frank Langella Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can only lead by example.”

— Frank Langella

2. “Intelligence is enormously sexy.”

— Frank Langella

3. “There is a thing called the death wish, a literal thing. It doesn’t mean you want to die. It just means however we’re built, as we get into these years, some inner part of you does begin to accept the fact that you’re heading towards the end, and there’s a peace that comes with that.”

— Frank Langella

4. “Getting old is not for sissies, kid.”

— Frank Langella

5. “I would rather spend one night with Dracula dead than with my husband alive.”

— Frank Langella

6. “It’s a living, breathing thing, acting.”

— Frank Langella

7. “There’s nothing like the bravery and the strength and the extraordinary optimism of a five-year-old child in a cancer hospital, fighting to live. It’s there inside the spirit.”

— Frank Langella

8. “Revelations come when you’re in the thick of it, pitting yourself up against something larger than yourself.”

— Frank Langella

9. “You can only lead by example, and you can only say it might be better for you if. But nobody can do anything until they’re ready to do it. So you can sit down with a strong-minded young man of 24, as my son was at a point, and say now listen, this, this, this, and this.”

— Frank Langella

10. “One of the safest places to be in the world is the stage.”

— Frank Langella

11. “It’s interesting to fantasize having a man sink his teeth into your neck for sustenance, knowing that it isn’t going to be terribly painful but rather very exciting.”

— Frank Langella

12. “Vampires are sexy to a woman perhaps because the fantasy is similar to that of the man on the white horse sweeping her off to paradise.”

— Frank Langella

13. “When asked what it takes to succeed in the acting profession, Bette Davis would answer, “the courage to be hated.””

— Frank Langella

14. “My body of work means nothing to me.”

— Frank Langella

15. “Theres a great deal of attention paid and books written about this change of life in a woman, and really very little written about a mans change of life.”

— Frank Langella

16. “But I firmly believe that you can’t be emotionally free until you are emotionally committed.”

— Frank Langella

17. “We do most of what we do out of our sexual energy and our sexual needs.”

— Frank Langella

18. “But in order to be the thing you want to be, you have to work like a dog at the thing you love.”

— Frank Langella

19. “I always signed autographs when I could and always stayed and chatted with them when I could.”

— Frank Langella

20. “If you’re lucky as you get older, you respect the craft and it becomes a skill.”

— Frank Langella

21. “The only thing you have then to believe in is your craft.”

— Frank Langella

22. “You get kinder when you get into my age range. You think back to how really unkind you were, and how cynical you were and how you tossed things away and you tossed people away, and you didn’t care because you were climbing some mountain that you thought you needed to be on top of.”

— Frank Langella

23. “I had to face within myself all the things I didn’t do and wasn’t while I was wearing my own crown.”

— Frank Langella

24. “I watch actors destroy themselves by trying to get it right.”

— Frank Langella

25. “The last few years have been pretty hectic.”

— Frank Langella

26. “I have a list a mile long of faults that sometimes bring me to my knees in self-hatred.”

— Frank Langella

27. “There are no taboos in bed, and there shouldn’t be any taboos in bed.”

— Frank Langella

28. “I now want to be playing parts more interesting to me and more exciting to me.”

— Frank Langella

29. “When I closed in “King Lear” I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I’ve talked to who’s ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.”

— Frank Langella

30. “I’m hardly disinterested totally in my appearance.”

— Frank Langella

31. “You start acting in spite of your neuroses, not because of them.”

— Frank Langella

32. “But I think one of the reasons I tend to stay in the water most of the time is I distrust the comfort.”

— Frank Langella

33. “A five-year-old Chinese girl knows more about football than I do.”

— Frank Langella

34. “But when I was seven or eight, I did my first little piece of acting.”

— Frank Langella

35. “I’d always felt a man should marry later in life.”

— Frank Langella

36. “I’m a firm believer in absolute honesty.”

— Frank Langella

37. “Then, for a hot three or four weeks I wanted to be a concert pianist.”

— Frank Langella

38. “However, I don’t by any means suggest that I’m always playing myself.”

— Frank Langella

39. “There is no right in acting.”

— Frank Langella

40. “My last kids were born when I was in my forties, so I still had little kids around me, which gave me the illusion of feeling younger.”

— Frank Langella

41. “There’s a certain secret every actor must have in his work. If you reveal it, you’re letting the audience in on the wrinkles and convolutions of your brain. All I want them to do is to see the effect.”

— Frank Langella

42. “Physical qualities don’t really matter much.”

— Frank Langella

43. “I grew up in a household where everybody lived at the top of his lungs.”

— Frank Langella

44. “I have always felt the basis of everything in life is sexual, and I will maintain that to my dying day.”

— Frank Langella

45. “As a matter of fact, I rarely ever play myself.”

— Frank Langella

46. “I just feel that no matter what comes in a career – and mine has been all over the map – you must stay at the table, pick up the cards you’re dealt and play them.”

— Frank Langella

47. “Each of us needs something – food, liquor, pot, whatever – to help us survive. Dracula needs blood.”

— Frank Langella

48. “And the test for any actor is whether you stay at the table or go away.”

— Frank Langella

49. “Absolutely. I can produce. I can write. I can direct.”

— Frank Langella

50. “What helped me most were my failures and slumps – when I couldn’t get work, people weren’t interested in me or had written me off.”

— Frank Langella