Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Byron, Lord

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

John, Elton

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.

Half, Robert

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

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

Lansbury, Angela

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

Pacino, Al

10.

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

Howard, Ron

11.

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

12.

I have to act to live.

Olivier, Sir Lawrence

13.

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

Baldwin, Alec

14.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

15.

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

16.

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

Wood, Elijah

17.

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

Cusack, John

18.

An actress must never lose her ego--without it she has no talent.

Shearer, Norma

19.

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

Carrey, Jim

20.

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

Field, Eugene

21.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

22.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

23.

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

24.

Parker, Sarah Jessica

25.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis

26.

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

27.

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

28.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

29.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

30.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

Woodard, Alfre

31.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

32.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

33.

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)

34.

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

Barthes, Roland

35.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

36.

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

37.

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

Spacey, Kevin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

George, Boy

41.

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

42.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Hagen, Uta

43.

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

44.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

45.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

Johnson, Samuel

46.

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head--remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.

Brandy

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.

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

Garland, Judy

49.

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

50.

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.