Quotes about Acting

An actress can only play a woman. I an actor - I can play anything.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

In life, as in acting, sometimes you play an extra in the background of a scene other times you get the leading role.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

Your performance is not about you. It is about you giving the gift of your talent to your audience.

Thinking before speaking can eliminate embarrassment.

Thinking before acting often eliminates the need to apologize.

Don't you see!? We're actors — we're the opposite of people!

I am not myself; I am the potential of myself.

What works for acting works for life. To act brilliantly, to live fully, requires nothing less than the complete investment of your entire soul! What we do is holy!

“It is easy to coast through life rather than find the will to continually reach out into the world.  To reach out is to risk.  There is little grace in a life that never extends out beyond the boundaries of self”

Who talks by silence, does the most.

I was in rehearsals, waiting behind a door to come out while a couple onstage were having a row. They started throwing furniture and a chair lodged in front of the door.

My cue came and I could only get halfway in. I stopped and said, 'I can't get in. The chair's in the way.'

And the producer said, 'Use the difficulty.'

I said, 'What do you mean?'

And he said, 'Well, if it's a drama [you're acting in], pick up the chair and smash it. If it's a comedy, fall over it.'

This idea stuck in my mind, and I taught it to my children -- that any situation in life that's negative, there is something positive you can do with it.

Courage is always and only one thing: It is acting with fear, not without it.

So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.

As it is with a play, so it is with life-what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is.

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

People who exercise their embryonic freedom day after day, little by little, expand that freedom. People who do not will find that it withers until they are literally ''being lived.'' They are acting out scripts written by parents, associates and society.

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.

Some of the greatest love affairs I've known have involved one actor--unassisted.

The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter's bell A moment yet the actor stops And looks around to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task: And when he's laughed and said his say He shows, as he removes the mask, A face that's anything but gay.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part.

[His acting] remains forever fixed in a time that never dates.

He's acting alone. He's cut off from his chain of command. He's exhibiting symptoms of pressure-induced psychosis, and he has a nuclear weapon. So as a personal favour to me, would you lay off him?

The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the [Constitutional] Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. . . . And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.

Learning and then not acting on what you learn is like plowing and then never planting.

Of the various executive abilities, no one excited more anxious concern than that of placing the interests of our fellow-citizens in the hands of honest men, with understanding sufficient for their stations. No duty is at the same time more difficult to fulfil. The knowledge of character possessed by a single individual is of necessity limited. To seek out the best through the whole Union, we must resort to the information which from the best of men, acting disinterestedly and with the purest motives, is sometimes incorrect.

In contemporary American public culture, the legacy of the consumer revolution of the 1960s is unmistakable. Today, there are few things more beloved of our masses than the figure of the cultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates of the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out in a mowhawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by his own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, a soldier of fortune with explosive bow and arrow, or a rock star in leather jacket and sunglasses, the rebel has become the paramount cliché of our popular entertainment, and the pre-eminent symbol of the system he is supposed to be subverting. In advertising especially, he rules supreme

Acting is a form of confusion.