Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

I have to act to live.

- Olivier, Sir Lawrence

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

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

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

Vaughan, Bill

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

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

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

Richardson, Miranda

10.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Wood, Elijah

15.

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

George, Boy

16.

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

17.

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

Goldblum, Jeff

18.

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

Field, Eugene

19.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

20.

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

Sinden, Donald

21.

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

Diderot, Denis

22.

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

23.

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

Fiske, Minnie

24.

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

Barthes, Roland

25.

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

Baldwin, Alec

26.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

27.

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

28.

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

Amiel, Henri Frederic

29.

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

30.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

31.

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

Leoni, Tea

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.

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

34.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

35.

All men practice the actor's art.

Petron

36.

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

37.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

38.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

39.

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

Glass, George

40.

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

41.

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

Forrest, Edwin

42.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

43.

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

44.

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

Fonda, Jane

45.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

46.

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

47.

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

Newman, Paul

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

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