Quotations/Quotes by Buster Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966)

A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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All my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, `Look at the poor dope, wilya?

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Charlie`s tramp was a bum with a bum`s philosophy. Lovable as he was, he would steal if he got the chance. My little fellow was a working man and honest."

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton, On the differences between his and Charles Chaplin`s characters

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Dumb show is best for screen people, if they must appear in public.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Everybody at Metro was in my gag department, including Irving Thalberg. They'd laugh their heads off at dialogue written by all your new writers. They were joke-happy. They didn't look for action; they were looking for funny things to say.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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From the time I was 7 or 8 years old, we were the roughest knockabout act that ever was in the history of the theater, not only in the United States but all over Europe as well. We used to get arrested every other week--that is, the old man would get arrested. The first crack out of the box here in New York state, the Keith office raised my age two years, because the original law said that no child under 5 could even look at the audience, let alone do anything. So they said I was 7. And the law read that a child can't do acrobatics, can't walk a wire, can't juggle--a lot of those things--but there was nothing said in the law that you can't kick him in the face or throw him through a piece of scenery. On that technicality, we were allowed to work, although we'd get called into court every other week, see.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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I gotta do some sad scenes. Why, I never tried to make anybody cry in my life! And I go `round all the time dolled up in kippie clothes-wear everything but a corset...can`t stub my toe in this picture nor anything! Just imagine having to play-act all the time without ever getting hit with anything!

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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It was an event when you could get all three of them on the set at the same time. The minute you started a picture with the Marx brothers you hired three assistant directors. One for each Marx brother. You had two of 'em while you went to look for the third one and the first two would disappear.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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I'm so sorry I fell down.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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I`ve had few dull moments [in my life] and not too many sad and defeated ones. In saying this I am by no means overlooking the rough and rocky years I`ve lived through. But I was not brought up thinking life would be easy. I always expected to work hard for my money and to get nothing I did not earn. And the bad years, it seems to me, were so few that only a dyed-in-the-wool grouch who enjoys feeling sorry for himself would complain.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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I've simply been brought up being knocked down.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Life is too serious to do farce comedy.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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No man can be a genius in slapshoes and a flat hat.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Not long ago a friend asked me what was the greatest pleasure I got from spending my whole life as an actor. There have been so many that I had to think about that for a moment. Then I said, `Like everyone else, I like to be with a happy crowd`

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Only things that one could imagine happening to real people, I guess, remain in a person`s memory.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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The camera can't catch my blushes!

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Think slow, act fast.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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We didn't stick to any format. We would just get an idea, and once you started on the idea it would lend itself to gags and natural trouble of any kind. There was no format.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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Well, I'd say that the minute sound came in, it was everybody talking their heads off and going for dialogue laughs. All your writers did the same thing. Once that started, it took years to ever get anybody even to touch that old type of material again

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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What really got my goat at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers who never wrote their own jokes.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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What used to get my goat at MGM were comedians like The Marx Brothers or Abbott and Costello who never worried about the script or the next scene. My God, we ate, slept and dreamed our pictures.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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When sound came, we found this out--we found this out from our own pictures--that sound didn't bother us at all. There was only one thing I wanted at all times, and insisted on: that you go ahead and talk in the most natural way, in your situations. Don't give me puns. Don't give me jokes. No wisecracks.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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when told to cheer up at an MGM film premiere, the reporter asked, "Are you happy to be here?" Of course, I got off location for this!

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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When we made a picture we ate, slept and dreamed them.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton [Commenting on his pre-1928 days]

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You could write the whole plot on a postcard. We do the rest.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

Quotations/Quotes:- Buster Keaton

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