Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Vaughan, Bill

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

Newman, Paul

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

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

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

Goldblum, Jeff

After Blood Simple, everybody thought I was from Texas. After Mississippi Burning, everybody thought I was from Mississippi and uneducated. After Fargo, everybody's going to think I'm from Minnesota, pregnant, and have blonde hair. I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

McDormand, Frances

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

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

Cusack, John

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

Davis, Bette

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.

10.

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

Half, Robert

11.

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

12.

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

Hitchcock, Alfred

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

16.

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

Glass, George

17.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

18.

You are not in business to be popular.

Alley, Kirstie

19.

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

Fonda, Jane

20.

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

Lansbury, Angela

21.

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

22.

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

Richardson, Miranda

23.

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

24.

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

George, Boy

25.

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

Moreau, Jeanne

26.

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

Thomas, Jonathan Taylor

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

30.

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

Spacey, Kevin

31.

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

32.

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

Irons, Jeremy

33.

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

Leoni, Tea

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.

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

Pacino, Al

36.

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

Barthes, Roland

37.

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

Marceau, Marcel

38.

For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

Bernhardt, Sarah

39.

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)

40.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

Brecht, Bertolt

41.

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

42.

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

43.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

Rogers, Ginger

44.

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

Barrymore, Ethel

45.

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

Carrey, Jim

46.

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

Vaughan, Bill

47.

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

48.

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

Wood, Elijah

49.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

50.

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