Acting Quotes

The thing that makes you say, I want to do something - that is the beginning of talent.

~ Stella Adler

DENIAL OF EMOTIONSOur culture does not handle emotions well. We like folks to be happy and fine. We learn rituals of acting happy and fine at an early age. I can remember many times telling people I'm fine when I felt like the world was caving in on me. I often think of Senator Muskie who cried on the campaign trail when running for president. From that moment on he was history. We don't want a president who has emotions. We would rather have one that can act! Emotions are certainly not acceptable in the workplace. True expression of any emotions that are not positive are met with disdain.

~ John Bradshaw

When life gives you lemons...add melted butter , toasted paprika and dip some lobster in it!

~ Stuart J. Scesney

When life gives you lemons...add melted butter , toasted paprik and dip some lobster in it!

~ Stuart J. Scesney

When life gives you lemons...add melted butter , toasted paprike and dip some lobster in it!

~ Stuart J. Scesney

I'm not that good of an actor to fake something like that.

~ Dana Burkey

...the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.

~ Joan Didion

People don't say what they mean very often. You have to read between the lines of their behavior, of what they say, to get to what they truly feel. That's what good literature is all about-- what Austen did better than anyone.

~ M.c. Frank

...teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

~ Steve Martin

As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.

~ Wil Wheaton

Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.

~ Various Attributed Sources

Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?

~ Jennifer Donnelly

You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.

~ Lillian Gish

The master action to move forward, is a form of inaction; being still and quiet.

~ Bryant Mcgill

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.

~ Abhijit Naskar

...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

~ Albert Camus

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

~ Benedict Cumberbatch

At once, it’s clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don’t have the arrogance. Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious By the end of the session, I am no one at all.

~ Suzanne Collins

You are the actor. Your body brings in something, call it presence, and it happens by degrees. Arms, chest, haunches and thighs, calves and feet. The body, firing synapses, in between and in the gray matter. On and off. The billions of cells, the body mechanisms, the busy regulating, the adjusting, the retinas contracting and expanding, body secreting, beating, moving, breathing and pulsing. Your being registers here. Swallow. Inhale. Open mouth to press air out to touch the flesh in the throat to make sound. You are the actor. A thing of flesh and feeling. Perfect because you aren't.

~ Richard Maxwell

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

~ Susan Sarandon

In his madness he became a terrifying actor!

~ Luigi Pirandello

I'd found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary. And I played the same part again and again and again.

~ Felicia Day

In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel

~ Konstantin Stanislavski

Physicality is the basis of performance.

~ David Petersen

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

~ Amanda Craig

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

~ Mark Waid

It was a relief to inhabit someone else's life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character's problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.

~ Alexandra Robbins

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

~ Stella Adler

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

~ Stella Adler

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

~ Stella Adler

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

~ Stella Adler

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

~ Stella Adler

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

~ Stella Adler

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

~ Chila Woychik

MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting.

~ Mindy Mejia

It is impossible to get rid of the bondage of slavery, if we do not start acting as free citizens of our country

~ Sunday Adelaja

Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.

~ Alan Rickman