Buster Keaton Quotes

The funny thing about our act is that dad gets the worst of it, although I'm the one who apparently receives the bruises … the secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment.

My God, we ate, slept and dreamed our pictures.

It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers — singers and acrobats and musicians — to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.

Silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter.

I do not really think Charlie knows much more about politics, history, or economics than I do. Like myself he was hit by a make-up towel almost before he was out of diapers.

"Down through the years my face has been called a sour puss, a dead pan, a frozen face, The Great Stone Face, and, believe it or not, "a tragic mask." On the other hand that kindly critic, the late James Agee, described my face as ranking "almost with Lincoln's as an early American archetype, it was haunting, handsome, almost beautiful." I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased."

If one more person tells me this is just like old times, I swear I'll jump out the window.

We used to get arrested every other week — that is, the old man would get arrested.

Nobody suspected that the World War just ending would prove to be merely the first one. Had not President Wilson proclaimed it the war to end all wars — if we jumped in and did the dirty job?

Marriage is fine as an institution, but bad as a habit.

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

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

A picture without falls is as bad as Niagara in the same fix.

I was standing on the deck looking down at a gang of stevedores working on the dock thirty feet below. One of them recognized me, nudged his neighbor, and pointed. All at once the whole gang stopped working to yell, 'Booster! Booster Keaton!' They waved in wild excitement, and I waved back, marveling, because it was fifteen years of more since they could have seen my last M-G-M picture.
And if there is sweeter music this side of heaven I haven't heard it. Dr. Avedon said I could live to be a hundred years old. I intend to do it. For who would not wish to live a hundred years in a world where there are so many people who remember with gratitude and affection a little man with a frozen face who made them laugh a bit long years ago when they and I were both young?

Our hero came from Nowhere — he wasn't going Anywhere and he got kicked off Somewhere.