Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

After Blood Simple, everybody thought I was from Texas. After Mississippi Burning, everybody thought I was from Mississippi and uneducated. After Fargo, everybody's going to think I'm from Minnesota, pregnant, and have blonde hair. I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

- McDormand, Frances

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

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

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

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

Garland, Judy

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

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)

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

10.

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

11.

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

Diderot, Denis

12.

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

Python, Monty

13.

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

14.

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

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

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.

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

Davis, Bette

18.

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

Johnson, Alva

19.

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

Byron, Lord

20.

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

21.

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

Sinden, Donald

22.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

23.

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

24.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Quinn, Anthony

30.

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

Richardson, Miranda

31.

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

Forrest, Edwin

32.

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

33.

I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

Hitchcock, Alfred

34.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Baldwin, Alec

35.

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

Cervantes, Miguel De

36.

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

Close, Glenn

37.

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

George, Boy

38.

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

39.

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

Wood, Elijah

40.

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

Barthes, Roland

41.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

42.

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

43.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

44.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Vaughan, Bill

49.

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

50.

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

Pacino, Al