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

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

Spacey, Kevin

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

Barthes, Roland

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

Moreau, Jeanne

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

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

Byron, Lord

Acting is happy agony.

Guiness, Sir Alec

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

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

Sinden, Donald

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

10.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

11.

When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. Before going into a fire, there's the same surge of adrenaline you get just before the camera rolls.

Buscemi, Steve

12.

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

Pacino, Al

13.

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

14.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

15.

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

16.

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

Quinn, Anthony

17.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

18.

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

Fiske, Minnie

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Python, Monty

26.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

27.

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

Glass, George

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

34.

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

Field, Eugene

35.

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

Irons, Jeremy

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

41.

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

Cusack, John

42.

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

43.

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

Duras, Marguerite

44.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

45.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

46.

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

Diderot, Denis

47.

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

Marceau, Marcel

48.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

49.

One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.

Bresson, Robert

50.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence