- The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
~ Aristotle - To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
~ Marlon Brando - We don’t live for realities, but for the fantasies, the dreams of what might be. If we lived for reality, we’d be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going…When you are acting, don’t settle for anything less than the biggest dream for your character’s future.
~ Michael Shurtleff - I’m looking for the truth. The audience doesn’t come to see you, they come to see themselves.
~ Julianne Moore - Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
~ Sanford Meisner - Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.
~ Bette Davis - Acting is not about being famous, it’s about exploring the human soul.
~ Annette Bening - The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.
~ Constantin Stanislavski - I think you should take your job seriously, but not yourself. That’s the best combination.
~ Judi Dench - Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be ‘nice,’ you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.
~ Larry Moss - The thing about performance, even if it’s only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
~ Daniel Day Lewis - The best acting is instinctive. It’s not intellectual, it’s not mechanical, it’s instinctive.
~ Craig MacDonald - It’s difficult, if not impossible, to get away with anything false before the camera. That instrument penetrates the husk of the actor; it reveals what’s truly happening – if anything, if nothing. A close-up demands absolute truth. It’s a severe and awesome truth.
~ Elia Kazan - Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
~ Rosalind Russell - Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
~ Meryl Streep - Good acting — real acting is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to show me where.
~ William Esper - An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment – his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego.
~ Alec Guinness - An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.
~ James Dean - Find in yourself those human things which are universal.
~ Sanford Meisner - An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.
~ Michael Chekhov - The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.
~ Stella Adler - An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
~ Sanford Meisner - For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
~ Ethel Barrymore - I know that if I’d had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn’t have got anywhere. You don’t take exams for acting, you take your courage.
~ Edith Evans - I say luck is when an opportunity comes around and you’re prepared for it.
~ Denzel Washington - Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.
~ Rodney Dangerfield - I never act. I simply bring out the real animal that’s in me.
~ Willem Dafoe - Nothing is impossible. The word itself says I’M POSSIBLE.
~ Audrey Hepburn - The actors who are prepared to make fools of themselves are usually the ones who come to mean something to the audience.
~ Christian Bale - If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.
~ Jack Lemmon - While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.
~ Oscar Wilde - The magic doesn’t come from within the director’s mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.
~ James Cameron - One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We’re not scientists. We don’t always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.
~ Stella Adler - Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.
~ Michael Shurtleff - Acting is the most personal of our crafts. The make-up of a human being – his physical, mental and emotional habits – influence his acting to a much greater extent than commonly recognized.
~ Lee Strasberg - I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
~ Thornton Wilder - Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.
~ Glenda Jackson - Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
~ Jeff Goldblum - Actors are responsible to the people we play. I don’t label or judge. I just play them as honestly and expressively and creatively as I can.
~ Philip Seymour Hoffman - I don’t think I’m even close to fulfilling my potential. And I think also that, unlike a pianist or a flutist, an actor has an instrument that is constantly changing.
~ Kerry Washington - If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
~ Katharine Hepburn - The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.
~ Michael Shurtleff - Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.
~ William Esper - I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
~ Oscar Wilde - The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
~ Stella Adler - I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
~ Al Pacino - I love acting because it’s a bit of an escape. It gives you the ability to reinvent yourself. They say that acting is the shy man’s revenge.
~ Hayden Christensen - For most actors, success is achieved through study, struggle, preparation, infinite trial and error, training, discipline, experience and work!
~ Robert Cohen - With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it’s just not acting. It’s lying.
~ Johnny Depp - Acting can be fun. Don’t let it get around.
~ Sanford Meisner
- Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
- Sanford Meisner - An actor is a fool for God.
- Gerardine Clark - Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.
- Bette Davis - The best acting is instinctive. It's not intellectual, it's not mechanical, it's instinctive.
- Craig MacDonald - That's what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules.
Gerardine Clark - Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
- Bette Davis - Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
- Rosalind Russell - Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
- Meryl Streep - Good acting -- real acting is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to show me where.
- William Esper - Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!
- Craig MacDonald - Find in yourself those human things which are universal.
- Sanford Meisner - The more personal, the more universal.
- Gary Ballinger - An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.
- Michael Chekhov - Use what you know. Don't worry about what you don't know.
- Michael Shurtleff - The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.
- Stella Adler - An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
- Sanford Meisner - Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.
- Michael Shurtleff - If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.
- Jack Lemmon - Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.
- Michael Shurtleff - Listening is not merely hearing. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is active.
- Michael Shurtleff - Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.
- Michael Shurtleff - Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street Bridge.
- Michael Shurtleff - Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.
- Michael Shurtleff - The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.
- Michael Shurtleff - Competition [in a scene] is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don't want to compete. They want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors.
- Michael Shurtleff - Honesty isn't enough for me. That becomes very boring. If you can convince people what you're doing is real and it's also bigger than life -- that's exciting.
- Gene Hackman - Take nothing for granted. Make an emotional discovery as often as you can find one in every scene. Ask yourself: What is new?
- Michael Shurtleff - There's only one reason why a character drinks: to seek confrontation. To fight for what they want in ways normally denied them.
- Michael Shurtleff - My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
- Meryl Streep - I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.
- Meryl Streep - I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.
- Meryl Streep - I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
- Meryl Streep - All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.
- Meryl Streep - The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
- Miguel de Cervantes - Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.
- William Esper - Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.
- W. C. Fields - Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- George Burns - The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
- W.H. Auden - Actors die so loud.
- Henry Miller - I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
- Oscar Wilde - If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
- Thornton Wilder - The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
- Stella Adler - I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.
- Michael Caine - Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.
- Michael Shurtleff - Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
- George Bernard Shaw - There's nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.
- Tim Robbins - Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
- Stella Adler - I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
- Meryl Streep - I need to go where people are serious about acting.
- Meryl Streep - The work will stand, no matter what.
- Meryl Streep
Practical Acting Quotes
Acting quotes to remember when you're working.
Funny Acting Quotes
Acting quotes to make you laugh.
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