Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

Hazlitt, William

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

John, Elton

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

Carrey, Jim

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

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

Half, Robert

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.

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

Irons, Jeremy

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

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

Newman, Paul

10.

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

Byron, Lord

11.

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

Welles, Orson

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

16.

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

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

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

19.

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

Johnson, Alva

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

23.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

24.

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

Sinden, Donald

25.

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

Glass, George

26.

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

Kavanagh, Patrick

27.

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

George, Boy

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Fonda, Jane

34.

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

Hannah, Daryl

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Davis, Bette

38.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

39.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

40.

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

41.

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

42.

I can't tell you how many shows I've done with full-blown migraine headaches.

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

43.

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

Wood, Elijah

44.

You know how in high school you do these plays and people come up after the show and they're really excited for you? Well, that's what's happening to me right now.

Sorvino, Mira

45.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

46.

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

Marceau, Marcel

47.

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

Cusack, John

48.

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

Shearer, Norma

49.

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

50.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis