Chaplin Quotes

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

Einstein - the greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein's name will still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch and William Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which awaits the uncreative mind.

People try to put ownership on things: 'That's mine, that's my joke.' No such thing. Like if you tripped or stumbled and people go, 'Oh, that's Charlie Chaplin.' You know what I mean? You can't own a joke. You can be the guy that tells it the best, but you can't own a joke. Nowhere can you own a laugh.

There are people that I am in love with, totally in love with them. I would die for them. I love Michelangelo. I love Charlie Chaplin with all my heart. I love Walt Disney. These are the people I am nuts over. These are my people. I love the great ones.

My idol growing up was Charlie Chaplin. I was obsessed with him. I mean, while other kids were watching Jim Carrey and the likes in the '90s, I was watching Charlie Chaplin films, because I was a bit of a geek. I became obsessed with this idea of physical comedy.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we're still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

You won't find another Chaplin, you won't find another Keaton, because the school is closed.

I watched every single Charlie Chaplin film.

Chaplin made me laugh and cry without saying a word. I had an instinct. I was touched by the soul of Chaplin - Mime is not an imitator but a creator.

Charles Chaplin makes a million dollars a year out of a funny, shuffling walk and a pair of baggy trousers, because he does "something different." Take the hint and "individualize" yourself with some distinctive idea.

I'd like to produce, direct, write, score, and star in a film in exactly the way Chaplin did. I'll do that before I'm thirty.

Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

It didn't matter that Charlie Chaplin may not have been a great director or a great anything else. He made great movies.

I have some favorites. I love Chaplin; I mean I really love Chaplin. I just think there's a grace and an elegance that's almost never been matched.

When you see Charlie Chaplin, he stays funny. He doesn't become drama, and so what really seems to endure is comedy.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry

We felt that the public, and especially the children, like animals that are cute and little. I think we are rather indebted to Charlie Chaplin for the idea. We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin - a little fellow trying to do the best he could.

He's my favorite! He wrote and produced, and starred in and cast all of his movies! Can you imagine? I get really excited when I talk about Charlie Chaplin.

I know of only six genuine comic geniuses in movie history; Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx & Harpo Marx, Peter Sellers, and W.C. Fields.

Although I had good hand-eye coordination, I was so tall and skinny and muscularly weak that I just was not well coordinated. But what I started to do quite early on was watch some of the great old silent comedians, like Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin, and then later on Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.

When I was a kid, I loved all the silent comedians - Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin. And I used to imitate them. I'd go to see a Buster Keaton movie and come home and try things out I'd seen. I learned to do pratfalls when I was very young.

I grew up on Harold Lloyd, Charles Chaplin, and Buster Keaton, and those were the ones who inspired me.

Chaplin is no businessman

Chaplin is no business man - all he knows is that he can't take anything less.

Because of my comedic-influence growing up, Mel Brooks, Jim Carrey, Steve Martin… A lot of Jeff comedic-influences included Charlie Chaplin and physical comedians of the silent-era. What we were able to do together is to show all these major influences but make it into our own comedy. We've seen the stereotypical boy-meets-girl story a hundred thousand times…

I'm not 40 yet. I wouldn't even bother comparing myself to Chaplin.

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget.

I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it’s 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.

Bob Dylan may be the Charlie Chaplin of rock n' roll. Both men are regarded as geniuses by their entire audience. Both were proclaimed revolutionaries for their early work and subjected to exhaustive attack when later works were thought to be inferior. Both developed their art without so much as a nodding glance toward their peers.

Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it threatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.

I went to Berlin and Warsaw and Kraków to do research. Right after we got started, I had already booked this trip, so I went. Seeing the history and the posters, and hearing from the guy certain phrases and words and images, it's stunning how much they're playing from the handbook of the little mustache that isn't Chaplin. With Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini.

I wanted to live where I could pop to the bar that Humphrey Bogart took Lauren Bacall to, or the little restaurant where Charlie Chaplin had a booth.

I remember vividly seeing 'Tarzan' and Fred Astaire, the Chaplin films, Fred Astaire musicals, MGM, because of my mother. She was just interested in everything and she took me to opera and ballet, and then ballet got me hooked.

Comedy comes from a place of hurt. Charlie Chaplin was starving and broke in London, and that's where he got his character 'the tramp' from. It's a bad situation that he transformed into comedic one.

If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.

I could never be Charlie Chaplin. But the films that were made by people like him, or Gene Wilder, or John Candy, the people that inspired me so much were the people that were able to combine humor with heartbreak so beautifully and fluidly. Those films I think were what inspired me to want to come to L.A. and audition for movies.

He [Charlie Chaplin] was always playing as if it were to the camera, if you've seen the live shots of him when he's going to an opening night or something like that. And the skills that he had were beyond my ability to throw together. You just couldn't really compete with him. He was too athletic at that.

I think physical comedy is an amazing asset because it tells a story that's more universal than just language and dialogue. I grew up watching Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They're very powerful figures in my life.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.

The real achievement of Woody Allen was that he was making movies that felt very personal, and for a whole group of people, it spoke to them. Then he became an archetype, like Groucho Marx or Chaplin.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny, but working with him, I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre, he could be a very funny man to work with, always telling jokes and holding court. Of course, when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.

American culture has a lot of great moustaches in its history. Mark Twain had a great moustache, Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin ... but Zappa, he's got the best moustache in American history. Got the moustache, right, and he's got that little thing on his chin, I think it's called an imperial, that is, like, the coolest thing. That's like one of the great icons of the twentieth century.

What guided Chaplin was the proper protection of self-interest (or craziness). So Chapling, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mark Pickford, with DW Griffith and William S Hart, made an alliance, called United Artists, whereby they would own a distribution company that would market their pictures, allowing them a greater return than if they leased the movies to some outside distributor.

I think there's plenty of room, even in the most serious activist circles, for humor. Humor can be very effective both to inspire, and as a weapon. Just ask Frank Zappa and Charlie Chaplin.

Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can have. And when you can make someone laugh and cry, alternatively, as Chaplin does - now that's the highest of all personal achievements. I don't know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal.

Walt Disney said everything he had ever accomplished was a result of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was Walt's alter ego and he was originally modeled after Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character. So without Chaplin, who knows what Mickey would have become!

In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, 'for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century'. That's what the Academy was always for - to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art.

Charlie Chaplin is the greatest artist of the 20th century. He takes me from laughter to tears in seconds. And he was one of the very first funny men. It's like the original violins were made in Cremona and there's never been any better since. Sometimes the best come right off the bat.