Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

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

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

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

Pacino, Al

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

Carrey, Jim

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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

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

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

10.

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

Irons, Jeremy

11.

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

Moore, Mary Tyler

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that's about all there is to it.

Huston, John

17.

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

18.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

19.

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

20.

The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

21.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

22.

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes. [On filming MacHale's Navy]

Campbell, Bruce

23.

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

Shearer, Norma

24.

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

25.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

26.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

27.

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

Close, Glenn

28.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

29.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

Lansbury, Angela

30.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

31.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

32.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

33.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

34.

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

Leoni, Tea

35.

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

36.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

37.

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

38.

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

Byron, Lord

39.

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

40.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

41.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

42.

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

Garland, Judy

43.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

44.

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

Spacey, Kevin

45.

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

46.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

47.

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

48.

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

Welles, Orson

49.

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

50.

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