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

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

Sinden, Donald

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

Newman, Paul

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

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

Goldblum, Jeff

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.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

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

Baldwin, Alec

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

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

10.

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

Davis Jr., Sammy

11.

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

Vaughan, Bill

12.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

13.

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

Spacey, Kevin

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Irons, Jeremy

17.

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

Cusack, John

18.

People say I'm cocky, but am I supposed to sit here and be insecure and not know where my future's going or not realize that moviemaking is the greatest thing to happen to me?

Lewis, Juliette

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.

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

George, Boy

21.

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

Leoni, Tea

22.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

23.

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

Carrey, Jim

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Barthes, Roland

29.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

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.

You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

Howard, Ron

32.

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

33.

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

Fonda, Jane

34.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

35.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

36.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

37.

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

Byron, Lord

38.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

39.

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.

40.

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

41.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

45.

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

Davis, Bette

46.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Forrest, Edwin