Acting Quotes

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

~ Peggy Ashcroft

Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.

~ Kate Reid

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

~ Jean Anouilh

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

~ Orson Welles

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

~ William Hazlitt

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.

~ Richard Lester

Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

~ William T. Wylie

When actors begin to think it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.

~ Stephen Leacock

Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.

~ George Jean Nathan

An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.

~ Edwin Booth

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

~ Thornton Wilder

The live entertainment Canadians like most is the intimate review a collection of songs and sketches preferably with a satirical bias.

~ Nathan Cohen

Acting is happy agony.

~ Alec Guinness

With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.

~ George Burns

When the audience knows you know better it's satire but when they think you can't do any better it's corn.

~ Spike Jones

The person who wants to make it has to sweat. There are no short cuts. And you've got to have the guts to be hated.

~ Bene Davis

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

~ Joseph Wood Krutch

A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he is not alone in the way he feels about himself.

~ Jack Carson

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

~ Bette Davis

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

~ Henry Fonda

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

~ Gore Vidal

Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

~ Thornton Wilder

You need three things in the theatre - the play the actors and the audience and each must give something.

~ Kenneth Haigh

From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.

~ Maxwell Anderson

Hamlet is the tragedy of tackling a family problem too soon after college.

~ Tom Mas Son

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

~ Orson Welles

If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.

~ Katharine Hepburn

Show business is like sex. When it's wonderful it's wonderful. But when it isn't very good it's still all right.

~ Max Wall

All the movies used to be 'colossal'. Now they're all 'frank'. I think I liked 'colossal' better.

~ Beryl Pfizer

Satire is what closes Saturday night.

~ George S. Kaufman

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.

~ T. S. Eliot

By increasing the size of the keyhole today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

~ Peter Ustinov

We do not go (to the theatre) like our ancestors to escape from the pressure of reality so much as to confirm our experience of it.

~ Charles Lamb

A play visibly represents pure existing.

~ Thornton Wilder

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

~ Lilli Palmer

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.

~ J. B. Priestley

Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.

~ Ronald Jeans

I know it was wonderful but I don't know how I did it.

~ Laurence Olivier