Best 3782 quotes in «acting quotes» category

Duke was not what you would call a natural actor, but he learned. And when he learned, he mastered one of the hardest things of all - to act natural. And he does it so well that a lot of people still don't know he's acting. - Paul Fix

Emma, you and your poetry, me and my acting--what are we trying to do? We can't top this city. We poor would-be artists can't compete with or improve on the rich density of human experience on any random, average, slow summer night in New York--who are we trying to kid? In the overheard conversation in the elevator, in the five minutes of talk the panhandler gives you before hitting you for the handout, in the brief give-and-take when you are going out and the cleaning lady is coming in--there are the real stories, incredible, heartbreaking and ridiculous, there are the command performances, the Great American Novels but forever unwritten, untoppable, and so beautifully unaware.

Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...

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

Emotions don’t interfere in my acting, nor in my life.

Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

Find a good teacher, don't betray yourself to succeed and be a better person before being a better actor.

Follow your body because most of the time it knows where to go.

Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stageworthy.

Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.

Have a good looking is not worthy if you don't act just like your appearances.

Great acting is as much about the choices a performer makes as it is about their ability.

He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.

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.

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.

Here’s hoping this book will give wishful actors everywhere the inspiration and encouragement they need follow their dream. They need to know what the life of a working actor looks like and that it is possible to have a successful acting career and a full life without becoming a celebrity or star.

He inquired with the confidence of anyone trying free samples at a grocery store and putting on an Oscar-worthy performance of a person that was going to come back and buy it all later.

Here's the thing: It's not easy to be a woman in this business. There will always be jokes about your body. There will always be guys who steal your best ideas and pass them off as their own. There will always be actors who push you to the ground. There will always be networks that ask you to lose weight. There will always be jobs you will not get based on your looks. And the men will continue to support one another and show up for one another and hire one another, but if YOU want to stick around, girl, you better be damn sure you smile when they ask and wear a low-cut top to your network test and lose the fucking weight and let them take credit for your words because YOU are expendable. At some point, I started to not care if I was expendable.

I am a bit of a weird case. Here, people perceive me as French and in France, I am half-Asian or sometimes I have heard that I am not Asian enough. There’s always something and I don’t pay attention to anything. I love acting so much. I’m not going to stop at one, ten, twenty people telling me, “You’re too much like this” or “You’re not enough like that.” My team is well trained. I tell them, “Just get me in the room, get me the audition, even if they’re looking for a blonde American woman,” because once I’m there, maybe I can bring something different and change someone’s mind. I try to force doors. I would never fit a character on paper.

Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.

I am an actor, living generally on air, but I have always elastic hopes for the future; they may be stretched indefinitely, such hopes, without bursting

I constantly watch people like Marion Cotillard or Cate Blanchett or Kate Winslet... I have a fear of being passive, and what I admire about all those actresses is that every choice they make is really strong. Even if they're playing something very quiet, it's visceral and bold.

He was cut from the scene like a case of the runs from a can-can routine.

I don't belive in God. I believe in...Al Pacino.

I could play many types of characters on camera, but all were, in some way, going to be variations of me, and I was conscious of who I was. I wasn’t a prude or a goody two-shoes, but I was, in many ways, still the boy my mother praised for being good, and though older and more complex, I was content with remaining that good boy. I wanted to be able to talk about my work at the dinner table and hold my head up on Sundays when my wife and I led our children into the Brentwood Presbyterian Church, where I was an elder.

I don't believe in 'good exposure'. It is not how I was programmed.

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks

I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.

I don't care if you wear white to your coming-out party and pretend to be a virgin, but you're gay, Kit. G-A-Y. Gay! So gay, fairies everywhere will weep that your machismo avoided their gaydar for so long.

If its not worthy don't think, not true don't speak, not right don't act.

If it must be enjoyed, then it must be done. And if it must be done, then it must be done well. If it is done well, it is enjoyed well.

If my life were still a movie, this is the part that would end up on the cutting room floor. We were all just fill-ins for a long-running soap opera. The actors changed, but the story seldom did. Certainly not the action.

...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.

I don't understand', I say,'why they care what I think, as long as I'm acting how they want me to.' 'You're acting how they want you to now', he says,'but what happens when your Abnegation-wired brain tells you to do something else, something they don't want?

I don't think about a role as positive or negative. If I can play it convincingly, then I feel satisfied as an actor

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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