Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.

- Close, Glenn

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]

Selleck, Tom

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

Pacino, Al

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

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

Fiske, Minnie

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

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

Glass, George

10.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

Spacey, Kevin

11.

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

Jackson, Glenda

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

Davis, Bette

15.

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

16.

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

Lansbury, Angela

17.

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

18.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

19.

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

20.

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

21.

I don't think there's a punch-line scheduled, is there?

Python, Monty

22.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

23.

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

24.

This is not a tough job. You read a script. If you like the part and the money is O.K., you do it. Then you remember your lines. You show up on time. You do what the director tells you to do. When you finish, you rest and then go on to the next part. That's it.

Mitchum, Robert

25.

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

Cervantes, Miguel De

26.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Fonda, Jane

30.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

Irons, Jeremy

32.

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.

Sinden, Donald

33.

Celebrity is death --- celebrity -- that's the worst thing that can happen to an actor.

Cusack, John

34.

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

35.

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

Wood, Elijah

36.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

37.

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)

38.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Shaw, George Bernard

39.

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

40.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Goldblum, Jeff

41.

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.

42.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

43.

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

Newman, Paul

44.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

45.

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

46.

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

Hazlitt, William

47.

It's a business you go into because you're an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

48.

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

Hannah, Daryl

49.

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

Malkovich, John

50.

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