Christopher Hampton famous quotes

03-22-2025

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Art #Disappointment #Numbers
I love films. If I'd known how to get into or do it from the word go, I would have done that.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Done #Film #Love Films
I'm ashamed to say the first play I saw at the Royal Court was mine.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Play #Saws #Firsts
If you take a really good book, then the potential is for a really good film. But you've got to get it right.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Book #Film #Good Book
It's great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Real #Breathing #People
There is a sort of theory that you should adapt bad books because they always make more successful films.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Book #Successful #Film
There was a moment in the early '80s when I wanted to work on films and wanted to live in L.A.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Film #Moments #Wanted
Often I think the novels I read won't make very good movies - I better not say which I'm looking at for potential films! - but it's nice to have an excuse to just sit and read for a whole day.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Nice #Thinking #Good Movie
Since my adaptation of Ian McEwan's 'Atonement,' I get sent a lot of novels that people think will work as movies. So every now and then I make a point of sitting down and reading a couple of them.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Couple #Reading #Thinking
I find I have to give myself a day when I just shut myself off and do nothing but read.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Giving
You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Important #Scientist #Theory
If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Girl #Giving #Definitions
I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Lying #Thinking #Novelists
Masturbation is the thinking man's television.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Men #Thinking #Television
You see, I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Lying #Believe #Two
It's possible to disagree with someone about the ethics of non-violence without wanting to kick his face in.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Faces #Violence #Ethics
I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Husband #Thinking #Rivals
I like L.A., but I think whats changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Thinking #Kind #Film
I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Class #Decadence #Substitutes
To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?
-- Christopher Hampton

#Happiness #Religious #Seduction
My problem is I'm a man of no convictions - at least, I think I am.
-- Christopher Hampton

#Men #Thinking #Belief

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