Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

The actor's popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.

Forrest, Edwin

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

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

Marceau, Marcel

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

Brecht, Bertolt

Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.

Carrey, Jim

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

Sinden, Donald

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

Tracy, Spencer

Acting is happy agony.

Guiness, Sir Alec

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

10.

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

Hazlitt, William

11.

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

Howard, Ron

12.

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

Glass, George

13.

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

14.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

15.

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

16.

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

Irons, Jeremy

17.

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

18.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

19.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

20.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

21.

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

22.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

23.

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

Fonda, Jane

24.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Brando, Marlon

25.

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

Hannah, Daryl

26.

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

27.

D'Onofrio, Vincent

28.

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

29.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

30.

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

Newman, Paul

31.

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

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.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

Diderot, Denis

34.

I'd prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It's such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don't and they're like, They're trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she's looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.

Driver, Minnie

35.

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.

36.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Baldwin, Alec

37.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

38.

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

39.

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

Cusack, John

40.

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

Johnson, Alva

41.

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

Python, Monty

42.

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

Barthes, Roland

43.

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

Field, Eugene

44.

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

Welles, Orson

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

48.

I'm not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.

Stallone, Sylvester

49.

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

50.

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

George, Boy