Motivational Quotes

Acting and actors

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

- Marceau, Marcel

Best Quotes about Acting and actors

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

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

Newman, Paul

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

Lawless, Lucy

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

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.

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

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

George, Boy

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Baldwin, Alec

12.

Actors die so loud.

Miller, Henry

13.

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

Vaughan, Bill

14.

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

15.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Hepburn, Katharine

16.

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

Hepburn, Katharine

17.

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

Chaplin, Charlie

18.

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

Fonda, Jane

19.

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

20.

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

Diderot, Denis

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Leoni, Tea

24.

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

25.

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

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

26.

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

27.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

An actor is only merchandise.

Chow Yun-Fat

29.

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

30.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

31.

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

Cusack, John

32.

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

33.

A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.

Fonda, Jane

34.

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

35.

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

Pacino, Al

36.

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

Sinden, Donald

37.

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

38.

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

39.

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

40.

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

Hazlitt, William

41.

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

Irons, Jeremy

42.

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Damme, Jean-Claude Van

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Fonda, Henry

46.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Barkin, Ellen

47.

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

Lansbury, Angela

48.

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

Spacey, Kevin

49.

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

50.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

Presley, Elvis