Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

Stage charm guarantees in advance an actor's hold on the audience, it helps him to carry over to large numbers of people his creative purposes. It enhances his roles and his art. Yet it is of utmost importance that he use this precious gift with prudence, wisdom, and modesty. It is a great shame when he does not realize this and goes on to exploit, to play on his ability to charm.

- Stanislavisky, Konstantin

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Welles, Orson

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

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

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

Pacino, Al

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

Irons, Jeremy

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

Diderot, Denis

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

Forrest, Edwin

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

10.

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

Sinden, Donald

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Spacey, Kevin

14.

I find myself fascinating.

Dreyfus, Richard

15.

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

Glass, George

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

20.

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

Marceau, Marcel

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Garland, Judy

24.

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

25.

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

26.

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film -- you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.

Lewis, Daniel Day

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

33.

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

Byron, Lord

34.

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

35.

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

Cusack, John

36.

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

Duras, Marguerite

37.

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

38.

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

Half, Robert

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

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.

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

45.

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

46.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

47.

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

John, Elton

48.

I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.

Close, Glenn

49.

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.

50.

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

Field, Eugene