Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Hepburn, Katharine

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

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

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

Forrest, Edwin

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

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

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

10.

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

11.

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

Pacino, Al

12.

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

13.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

14.

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

John, Elton

15.

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

Irons, Jeremy

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

20.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

21.

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

Hazlitt, William

22.

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

23.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

24.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

25.

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

26.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

Garland, Judy

27.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

28.

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

Vaughan, Bill

29.

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

30.

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

Welles, Orson

31.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

32.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

33.

The mug is a tool. My ace in the hole. To have looks is the bonus on top of what motivates me to be an actor. Not to realize they're an asset would be counterproductive to the cause; they serve the common good.

Zane, Billy

34.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

Brando, Marlon

35.

Imagination, industry, and intelligence -- the three I s -- are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.

Terry, Ellen

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Duras, Marguerite

41.

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

Cusack, John

42.

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

Field, Eugene

43.

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

Spacey, Kevin

44.

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

45.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

50.

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

Marceau, Marcel