Best 3782 quotes in «acting quotes» category

...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.

If thinking should precede acting, then acting must succeed thinking.

If you are willing to expose your heart...being publicly private, you just may do something...

If you don't lose first you are not entitled to win.

If you want to be an actor, don’t. If you need to be an actor, do.

I had a dream about you. We were actors in a horror movie and I was hunting you down with a knife. When I finally cornered you the director yelled "Cut".... What? I can't be blamed for following instructions.

I know my career is going badly because I'm being quoted correctly.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.

I hated the fake world of celebrities, especially those my age. The media plays them up in sparkles and happiness to make it more appealing so they can exploit you. At least that’s what my naïve self thought of the entertainment world then.

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.

I love movies and all, but I could never imagine standing around saying lines and playing make believe all day. It’s too fucking ridiculous. Also, even children and animals can technically be actors. It’s not a job for a man.

I love it when you go to see something, and you enter as an individual, and you leave as a group. Because you've all been bound together by the same experience.

Improvisation is the power of spontaneous observation.

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

I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

I’m not an actor, I’m creating the mood for actors to be legends, a soundtracks creator

In the movies you get even; in life, diplomacy is best.

I never was very good at acting. I never was very good at playing the role. Because the true pretending can only come off in our genuine awareness of the real. Only those of us with the most secure grasp on the real can pretend; can really be good at the performance. And of course I didn't know what was real; I only knew the camera was always on.

In me all affections take place on the surface, but sincerely. I've always been an actor, and in earnest. Whenever I've loved, I've pretended to love, pretending it even to myself.

[In high school] my interests outside my academic work were debating, tennis, and to a lesser extent, acting. I became intensely interested in astronomy and devoured the popular works of astronomers such as Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, from which I learnt that a knowledge of mathematics and physics was essential to the pursuit of astronomy. This increased my fondness for those subjects.

In his madness he became a terrifying actor!

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.

I often wondered if the pursuit of the illicit was not tacitly encouraged among those in charge, devoted, as they all were, to profit. I could have been carrying on with a psychopathic serial murderer, and no one would have blinked an eye as long as I knew my lines and hit my mark with efficiency and a modicum of verve.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

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.

I take pride in playing immigrant characters. I've come across people who had a negative opinion about playing Asian characters that have an accent. I've even met Asian actors who won't audition for a role that has an Asian accent. They believe these accented characters reinforce the stereotype of an Asian being the constant foreigner. Frankly, I can't relate. I was an immigrant. And no matter how Americanized I become, no matter how much Jay-Z I listen to, I'll always be an immigrant. Just because I don't speak English with an accent anymore doesn't mean that I'm better than the people who do. My job as an actor is not to judge anyone and to portray a character with humanity. There are real people with real Asian accents in the real world. I used to be one of them. And I'm damn proud of it.

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.

I think I know where my life went wrong. For all the world's a stage and I'm a lousy actor!

... I think it possible that I have watched too many blue movies for it to have a lasting hold on me. If you grow accustomed to wall-to-wall, even the slightest shred of mystery or plot can become an agitation. Who cares why these people have found themselves in this banal, suburban tract home in Burbank? He is not a delivery man; she is not a bored housewife. They are not the stars---their orifices are. Let them open.

I think acting is revealing to people what it means to be human.

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

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.

It's about that applause I want to speak to you. I want you to remember that when you've done a little dance or a song or sketch, the applause which you get is not only because you yourself have done your best, but because each of those men is seeing in you someone he loves at home, and because of you is able to forget for a little while the unhappiness of not being in his home, and in some cases the great tragedy of not knowing what has happened to the children in his family.

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.

It’s difficult to really like a film that you didn’t like making.

It was said that the world is a stage, and if that's true… the show must go on no matter what happens. With that being true, we're all actors playing our parts… and what is acting in its core, but reacting… perceiving and reacting to what's been served?

I was thinking about … how disarming is the ability to make people laugh. It’s a gift, mimicry, but it’s not acting; in a way it’s the opposite of acting, which is why comedians are seldom good actors. There’s an element of exaggeration in the imposture; the copy is the original painted with a broad brush and it can be grotesque, even cruel. But no one is offended. People are drawn to the funnyman who can imitate a politician or a famous actor or an ethnic type, especially his own ethnic type.

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

I was just so afraid.... So afraid of being seen through, of being caught, that I missed the point. I missed the most important fact of it all, which is quite simply...they want to believe in you up there.... The audience wants to forget who's under the mask. But they don't want to forget because of obfuscation...no, they want to forget it's you by virtue of the passion of your performance. They want to be transported.... Transported to a world where bigger truths are at work, and anything--anything--can happen. A world where the impossible is possible. Batman can be someone like that for them, Bruce. Someone who defies every damn rule of logic that governs their lives.

I want to be spontaneous like a wild animal.

I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.

I was truly happy. But my state was not that of any ordinary satisfaction. It was a joy which stemmed directly from creative, artistic achievement.

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

Never measure success by other peoples standards. "Accomplishing YOUR OWN goals gives YOU the right to dictate YOUR own Success.

Maybe the trick is for me to always be in some sort of disguise, to always be dressed to play someone else. Only then can I really appreciate myself.

Michael Caine should have the last word on the reviews: 'What about those reviews then?' 'I don't read them.' 'Don't read them? You wrote them didn't you?

Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel

Nicole crumpled—just let her legs give way and fell to the floor, hunched and sobbing. Hayley looked at me. Even Rafe did. Uncertain looks from both of them. I had to admit, Nicole was a good actor. If I hadn't seen her switch from "sweet Nicole" to "raving lunatic Nicole" in a heartbeat at the campsite, I might have believed her myself.

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