Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Barthes, Roland

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

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

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

Chaplin, Charlie

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful -- my personal life suffers.

Pacino, Al

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

Lansbury, Angela

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

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

George, Boy

10.

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film -- you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.

Lewis, Daniel Day

11.

People say I'm cocky, but am I supposed to sit here and be insecure and not know where my future's going or not realize that moviemaking is the greatest thing to happen to me?

Lewis, Juliette

12.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

Byron, Lord

13.

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

14.

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

Johnson, Alva

15.

Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.

Davies, Marion

16.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

17.

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.

Sinden, Donald

18.

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

19.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar-- you pretend it's not there.

Hannah, Daryl

20.

Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.

Fields, W. C.

21.

Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.

Half, Robert

22.

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity -- and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.

Duras, Marguerite

23.

I don't want to read about some of these actresses who are around today. They sound like my niece in Scarsdale. I love my niece in Scarsdale, but I won't buy tickets to see her act.

Price, Vincent

24.

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

Newman, Paul

25.

The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.

Fiske, Minnie

26.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Wilder, Thornton

27.

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

Irons, Jeremy

28.

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

Vaughan, Bill

29.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

30.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

31.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

32.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Hagen, Uta

33.

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

Shearer, Norma

34.

In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum.

Quinn, Anthony

35.

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

36.

We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?

Macliammoir, Micheal

37.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- tripping on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Leif the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

Shakespeare, William

38.

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

39.

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

Hazlitt, William

40.

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

41.

The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

42.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

Moreau, Jeanne

43.

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

Howard, Ron

44.

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

Barrymore, Ethel

45.

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

Welles, Orson

46.

I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky. [On being an actor]

Ford, Harrison

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head--remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.

Brandy

50.

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