Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

I have to act to live.

- Olivier, Sir Lawrence

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

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.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

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

Pacino, Al

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

Goldblum, Jeff

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

Diderot, Denis

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

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

10.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

11.

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

12.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]

Selleck, Tom

13.

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

Forrest, Edwin

14.

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

15.

An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.

Glass, George

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Barthes, Roland

19.

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

George, Boy

20.

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

Spacey, Kevin

21.

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

22.

Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.

Davies, Marion

23.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Vaughan, Bill

27.

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

Richardson, Miranda

28.

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

29.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

30.

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

31.

One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.

Bresson, Robert

32.

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

Quinn, Anthony

33.

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

34.

Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robust periwig-pated fellow, tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

36.

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

37.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

38.

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

Fiske, Minnie

39.

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

Field, Eugene

40.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hazlitt, William

44.

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

45.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

46.

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

Newman, Paul

47.

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

Wood, Elijah

48.

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

Cusack, John

49.

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

50.

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

Carrey, Jim