Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Sinden, Donald

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Moreau, Jeanne

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

Irons, Jeremy

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

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

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

Wood, Elijah

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.

Johnson, Alva

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

Jackson, Glenda

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

Hepburn, Katharine

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

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, Alec

12.

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

13.

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

Richardson, Miranda

14.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

15.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar-- you pretend it's not there.

Hannah, Daryl

16.

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

Vaughan, Bill

17.

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

18.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

19.

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

Field, Eugene

20.

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

21.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

22.

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

Forrest, Edwin

23.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

24.

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

Duras, Marguerite

25.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

26.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

27.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Redford, Robert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- tripping on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Leif the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

Shakespeare, William

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

37.

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

Goldblum, Jeff

38.

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

Half, Robert

39.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

40.

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

41.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

42.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

43.

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

44.

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

Fonda, Jane

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

50.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.