Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

- Amiel, Henri Frederic

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

Caine, Michael

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

Johnson, Samuel

Some people are addicts. If they don't act, they don't exist.

Moreau, Jeanne

You can't do four movies and be good to everybody and be flying all night and shooting all day with a different wig and then be going to sing on Broadway without feeling a little tired. You endlessly feel you're letting somebody down.

Parker, Sarah Jessica

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

Garland, Judy

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

Wood, Elijah

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Welles, Orson

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

Vaughan, Bill

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

Marceau, Marcel

10.

I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

Hitchcock, Alfred

11.

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

Lawless, Lucy

12.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

Irons, Jeremy

13.

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.

Johnson, Alva

14.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

15.

From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.

Brosnan, Pierce

16.

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.

Whitaker, Forest

17.

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

Jackson, Glenda

18.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Hunter, Holly

19.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

Fonda, Jane

20.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

Lansbury, Angela

21.

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Dundy, Elaine

22.

An actress must never lose her ego--without it she has no talent.

Shearer, Norma

23.

Acting is happy agony.

Guiness, Sir Alec

24.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

Barthes, Roland

25.

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

Hazlitt, William

26.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

27.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

Lewis, Daniel Day

28.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

29.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

30.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. [On his acting techniques]

D'Onofrio, Vincent

31.

You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

Howard, Ron

32.

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes. [On filming MacHale's Navy]

Campbell, Bruce

33.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

Irving, Washington

34.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Auden, W. H.

35.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Newman, Paul

36.

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

37.

Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robust periwig-pated fellow, tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.

Shakespeare, William

38.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

39.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Olin, Lena

40.

The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.

Campbell, Thomas

41.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

42.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

Chaplin, Charlie

43.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

Wilde, Oscar

44.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

45.

The most minor gifts and not a very high class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.

Hepburn, Katharine

46.

Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.

Field, Eugene

47.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

Hepburn, Katharine

48.

An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.

Glass, George

49.

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

Moore, Mary Tyler

50.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Ulrich, Skeet