Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Moore, Mary Tyler

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Field, Eugene

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

It's a business you go into because you're an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

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

Hepburn, Katharine

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

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

Barthes, Roland

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

10.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

11.

First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

Caine, Michael

12.

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

13.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

14.

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

George, Boy

15.

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

16.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

20.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

21.

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

Fiske, Minnie

22.

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

Sinden, Donald

23.

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

Byron, Lord

24.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

25.

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

Newman, Paul

26.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

27.

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

28.

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

Duras, Marguerite

29.

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

Wood, Elijah

30.

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

Richardson, Miranda

31.

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

Davis, Bette

32.

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

33.

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

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.

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

Welles, Orson

36.

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

37.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Acting is happy agony.

Guiness, Sir Alec

43.

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

44.

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

45.

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

Forrest, Edwin

46.

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

Fonda, Jane

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.

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

49.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

50.

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.