Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

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

Half, Robert

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

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

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

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

Fiske, Minnie

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

John, Elton

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

Sinden, Donald

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

Newman, Paul

10.

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

Diderot, Denis

11.

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

Cusack, John

12.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. [On his acting techniques]

D'Onofrio, Vincent

13.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

14.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Moore, Roger

15.

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

Carrey, Jim

16.

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

Lansbury, Angela

17.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

18.

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

Byron, Lord

19.

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

Moore, Mary Tyler

20.

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

21.

Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that's about all there is to it.

Huston, John

22.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

23.

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

24.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

25.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Hunter, Holly

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Leoni, Tea

29.

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

30.

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.

Kline, Kevin

31.

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)

32.

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

33.

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

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

34.

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

Close, Glenn

35.

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

Irons, Jeremy

36.

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

Hannah, Daryl

37.

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

38.

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

Hazlitt, William

39.

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

40.

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

Barthes, Roland

41.

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

Glass, George

42.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

43.

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

Pacino, Al

44.

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

45.

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

46.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

47.

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

48.

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

Richardson, Miranda

49.

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

Spacey, Kevin

50.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis