“Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.”
- Ellen Barkin

 

"Acting "is forever carving a statue of snow."
- Lawrence Barrett

 

"There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.”
"If I ever start talking to you about my 'craft', my 'instrument', you have permission to shoot me."
"I try to make movies that I would want to go see rather than ones I would just want to do as an actor. I want people to have movies full of romance and hope and empowerment, something they can escape into and feel good about. I love happy endings."
- Drew Barrymore

 

“Once you do your homework, build your character's biography, immerse yourself in the period -- do all the conscious work -- then a moment of ease and effortlessness may come. You are transcended, you lose your self-consciousness. All ego concerns go away and you're free."
- Annette Benning

 

"Acting is experience with something sweet behind it."
- Humphrey Bogart

 

"If imagination is not set to the task of building a creative life, it busies itself with weaving a web of inner fears and doubts, blame and excuse."
- Laurence G. Boldt

 

“Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is fifty percent of the performance.”
- Shirley Booth

 

“Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are.”
- Marlon Brando

 

"As an actor, you the artist have to perform on the most difficult instrument to master, that is your own self, your physical being and emotional being.”
- Yul Brynner

 

“The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
- George Burns

 

“The audition process is really a most inadequate way to determine if an actor is right or not for a particular role. Unfortunately, it's a situation that most actors have to accept.
Work on developing an unshakable trust in yourself and your talent. It's important to present oneself as relaxed and confident even when you don't feel it. The role will find you if you are right for it. If you think it and feel it, the camera will capture it. Never interpret not getting a role as failure or as a reflection on yourself or your talent.”
- Gabriel Byrne

 

“I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.”
- Michael Caine

 

"Find your mark.  Look the other person in the eye.  And tell the truth."
- James Cagney

 

“The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.”
- Charlie Chaplin

 

"Everything in man must be beautiful."
- Anton Chekhov

 

"I (have) said that we cannot directly command our feeling, but that we can entice, provoke and coax them by certain indirect means. The same should be said about our wants, wishes, desires, longings, lusts, yearnings or cravings, all of which, although always mixed with feelings, generate in the sphere of our willpower.”
- Michael Chekhov

 

"I've found the important thing is to discover where my character is coming from. I don't mean in any deep psychological sense, just where she was a few minutes ago. What's her mind on right now.”
”In life you don't have huge psychological reasons for walking into a room, you just walk into a room.”
”You come from somewhere. And that place is either cold or it's hot or it's late or it's early, and you're usually thinking about something before you enter.”
”And bring your day on stage with you, which sounds simplistic, but it's actually very true. It opens you up to the nuances that are always there, always changing."
- Glenn Close

 

 “I live and work as an actor, part of an industry which generates countless "imaginings" of the ways in which life is or might be. Furthermore, the work of an actor involves intimate and constant submersion in the imagination. An actor is the "defense attorney" for his character. He must understand them intimately, imagine the circumstances of their life in sufficient detail as to create an inner-life complete with all the references, allusions, and the frames-of-reference the character would possess.”
”Once in urging me to memorize lines as automatically as one remembers the Lord's prayer, Roman Polanski, a brilliant film director, said, "If you have to think about stepping on the brakes, it's already too late." What he meant was that an actor must internalize the realities of a character's life to such a degree that they are liberated from all concerns but those of impulse and intuition.”
- Peter Coyote

 

“Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.”
- Bette Davis

 

 “And the problem with becoming an actor as an adult is that as you grow up you pile all these inhibitions upon yourself, and all the social mores. You get kidded by people as you're growing through your teenage years and into adulthood, and then, you're at the stage where you don't want to make a fool of yourself if at all possible. So when I hit my 20s and wanted to be an actor, I had to think of how to strip all this stuff off and go back to when I was about 10 or 11 and I could just sit there and daydream and place myself anywhere and be anybody, anything that you were pretending to be and do it believably, where actually you would feel on the inside that this was you.”
”I just joined acting classes and acted stupid. We would have acting classes where you do inhibition-relieving exercises or whatever they were, where you played chickens walking across the floor. How the hell do you play a chicken? I don't know but you tried all kinds of things like that. And you did all kinds of improvisation and they'd have you stand and just be. I had an acting coach who once said "Don't just do something, stand there". They wanted you to not be afraid to just be, just to stand there with your hands at your sides and be able to relate out and not be inhibited. There's really no way to teach you how to act, but there is a way to teach you how to teach yourself to act. That's kind of what it is; once you learn the little tricks that work for you, pretty soon you find yourself doing that.”
- Clint Eastwood

 

“Artists make order out of chaos.”
- Albert Einstein

 

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.”
- Albert Finney

 

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

 

“Do your job and demand your compensation, but in that order.”
- Cary Grant

 

"It's much easier to act than react"
- Gene Hackman

 

“I was fortunate to have a good teacher. I took beginners and advanced acting classes from this man. The most important thing he said to me was that acting wasn't a frivolous activity - it is a way of looking at the world in an aesthetic way. Everything you see and do, if you want to be an actor, has something to do with what you want to do. That was, like, "Whoa!" seriously. It opened up a whole new world to me.”
- Ed Harris

 

“You have to think of yourself, first and foremost, as a human being, and when you do that the whole world opens up. For sure, acting is the thing from which all things come to me. Any knowledge I have about writing or directing comes from acting. Acting is the center part of the wheel for me. But I feel like I enjoy acting so much more if I have a full and rich life that involves doing lots of other things and putting myself in new situations.”
- Ethan Hawke

 

“What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.
It's such a cuckoo business. And it's a business you go into because you are an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.”
- Katharine Hepburn

 

“It's so great to feel something evolving at every moment. I like the evolution, rehearsing, the privacy and secrecy and ritual of acting. I feel that it's a sacred thing, and I think our commercial society denigrates the sacredness of it. But I do, it's something to be approached with a sense of honour. Because what you want and hope for is possibility. Actors are showing people "This is possible". What could happen now, we don't know, but not knowing and the possibilities of that are very arresting to me, and very exciting. There's nothing better than working with a director or another actor who one, honours that as well, and two, has the chops to contribute.”
- Holly Hunter

 

"I'm not a talented man... I'm a focused man."
- William Hurt

 

”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.”
”The more you do, the more you realize how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good.”
”The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.”
- Glenda Jackson

 

“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.”
- Erica Jong

 

“... He was the first teacher to make it exciting, because he.. told me that it had to come from me.
He insisted. He said, "I don't care how you think X, Y, or Z would do it, and I don't care how you think it's supposed to be done, or what's the right way to do it. You take responsibility for that line.
That was a concept that suddenly made it tangibly an art form. 'Oh! It's about me.' And I have never wavered from that. It's about taking it personally.”
- Kevin Kline

 

"Acting is a glorious profession. As an actor you are put in a position where you can actually change somebody's life, you can affect them that much.
You can move and enlighten people - make them think where they had never thought before. And I think that is sensational.
Acting is about giving - not what you're getting out of it."
- Jack Lemmon

 

“The actor must believe -- not indicate, not imitate, not illustrate, not demonstrate -- he or she must believe in whatever his or her character is saying and doing, feeling and wanting -- for a 30-second take or an entire evening on stage.”
- James Lipton

 

"It's like a woman getting pregnant. This character, this person that I am to become, starts to grow inside me and I listen. If I don't listen, he will die in me."
- Marcello Mastroianni

 

"Everything else in my life receded, once I discovered theatre."
- Bette Midler

 

“The actor brings to his work the undeniable uniqueness of himself and the work takes on a personal quality that has a fabric incomparable to anyone or anything else.  It is unpredictable to the actor.  It is filled with inspiration and surprises which eliminate conventional expectations.  It has a crisp “one time” feeling that actually makes the audience believe it is happening here and now for the very first time, because, in a sense, it really is.“
- Eric Morris

 

“Use your weaknesses; aspire to the strength.”
”Have a very good reason for everything you do.”

“Don't be afraid to be outrageous; the critics will shoot you down anyway.”
- Laurence Olivier

 

"If you want to be able to express the maximum variety of things, then the more technical mastery you can achieve, the more FUN you're going to have"
- Geraldine Page

 

“Training is fabulous because it gives you a basis, a strong structure, so that when you're unbelievably nervous and you think that you can't get a word out, you will get the word out. Something is structured within you, that's what the training has given you, and it will come out.”
- Charlotte Rampling

 

"In this business it's either sink or swim. That's the great thing I love about this job, is "the have to."
"There is something great about being forced to pull it together. And confidence, real confidence, comes from that.
Confidence is something you earn with yourself."
- Julia Roberts

 

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players..."
- Shakespeare

 

“I can only speak for myself. From my own experience, [training] was invaluable. I had not grown up in a family that exposed me to a great deal of theatrical entertainment--mostly musical theatre. I didn't see any straight plays--or legit, as we called it. I had no desire from an early age to be on the stage. I'm very fond of adapting a Congreve quote: "He kind of dwindled into marriage." I kind of dwindled into acting. It was a process that evolved over time, and I was coming from academia. It made perfect sense that if you wanted to learn about [acting], you read books, you went to the theatre, you got involved with people in the process--and you went to class. It was natural for me to go.
In my own case, it was terribly important . . . in a less defined, less tangible, way. I saw and I met a lot of people who were in the field. It also provided a context in which I came to respect what the actor did, because I saw how difficult it actually was to do.
I was very impressed with the people I was taking classes with. I came to like them. And it was also a great deal of fun. What I wanted to do was take advantage of all the traditional Group Theatre-type people that were still around. My very first class was with Herbert Berghof. He encouraged me tremendously. That's another aspect of [classes] too: the encouragement and the mentoring that can go on. I received a great deal of encouragement from Herbert.
Then I started to study with Uta Hagen. HB was a wonderful place to start. I was still going to graduate school at the time. I could go there Tuesday afternoons and continue on my MA in Chinese history at St. John's University. Then I worked with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.
For me, acting school was essential. One, it was continuity. Being with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg, being in Stella Adler's class, I felt a connection to what had gone before. I understood, at least in this country, what people had been trying to do from the 1920s on. So I felt somewhat connected to the tradition. That was very, very important to me. It wasn't just an act of individual self-expression, [but] that we do exist historically in a context, and being with actors and directors of that generation was very important.
Two, I actually learned a lot of things that served me very well when it came to repeating performances on stage, because it is a craft and you do need a technique for it.
And, more than anything else, what I liked about it--which doesn't work for all actors--was the reflective nature, the self-reflection. That was very important. Because you need a tremendous--well, not everybody--but for me, a tremendous curiosity. You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do. It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever.”
- Ron Silver

 

“Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.”
- Donald Sinden

 

“Any great, any truly good training, education, continues to happen as you grow older because sometimes, very often actually, you’ll hear something in school and it’ll go in, and if it doesn’t go right out, if it actually stays in you may not have a context to put that information into. It may be six years down the line when something happens, and if you’re an actor, something happens in rehearsal or something happens in a moment with another actor or the director says something, and like a flash card comes down in front of your eyes and you’re like, ‘Oh my God that’s what they’re talking about!’ Because suddenly you have a personal context with which to place that information that before was just kind of abstract, and now it’s like BANG and it took you that long to learn that lesson. ‘That’s what that meant…wow. Now I understand that.”
- Kevin Spacey

 

“Play well, or play badly, but play truly.”
”Don't take yourself seriously. Take your work seriously.”
”In order to present a simple, a complex, or a mixed feeling, one has to understand the nature of this feeling.”
”All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real."
- Konstantin Stanislasvky

 

“Act in your pauses.”
- Ellen Terry

 

“The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.”
- Oscar Wilde

 

“Acting is like sex. You should do it, not talk about it.”
- Joanne Woodward