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

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

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

Byron, Lord

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

Goldblum, Jeff

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

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

Davis, Bette

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

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade.

Richardson, Miranda

10.

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

11.

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

Shearer, Norma

12.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Auden, W. H.

13.

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

Field, Eugene

14.

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

15.

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

Welles, Orson

16.

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

17.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

18.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

19.

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

Duras, Marguerite

20.

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

21.

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

Glass, George

22.

I don't do T & A very well because I haven't got much of either.

Leoni, Tea

23.

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.

Kline, Kevin

24.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Close, Glenn

28.

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

Fonda, Jane

29.

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

Carrey, Jim

30.

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

31.

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

32.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

33.

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

34.

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

Pacino, Al

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.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Sinden, Donald

45.

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

Wood, Elijah

46.

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

47.

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