Acting Quotes

I'd always enjoyed acting, but modeling was so time-consuming - and lucrative - that I didn't pursue it.

Having the right people around you all the time is important. I do take the acting seriously. But this is all fun. I look at it like smoke and mirrors. I still think it's a dream, but I ain't pinching myself yet.

I would have given up acting in a minute. I didn't like how it set me apart from other people.

I started being interested in acting when I heard the voices of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. I've had the great privilege of working with Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Anthony Hopkins. These are people who inspire the work that I do.

When you're a working actor and you're happy to be one, you can't focus all your energy on acting because you will go crazy. You have to focus as much energy as you can away from yourself.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

I think, ultimately, looking back now, acting wasn't satisfying me 100%.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort - and it was cute.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

As an actress I find the most enjoyable part of acting is really just to please the director. I just want to please my director.

You can be in an acting class all you want, but you don't fully learn until you get off that stage and in front of a camera.

I don't use my writing career as a vehicle to get me acting work or to write roles for myself.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

Most people want to become movie stars and I just want to be in the business. I already was a star. If I get the part of a lifetime and it blows up, then that's wonderful. But if the acting doesn't work, fine. I'll just be a producer. And if the producing doesn't work, fine. I've got a lot of other stuff.

I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975.

And what I liked the most about any project was that when it was good, you had a bunch of people trying to accomplish something together who were all acting together as one - that's the most exciting time for me.

I started acting without any vocation. I continued out of love.

Be where the acting is. I live in Houston. Dallas is 4 1/2 hours away. I let them know there's no difference.

I'm very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you're reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.

I was home-schooled. But going to high school, I never would've been able to travel the U.S. or been able to do acting.

Every now and then you get a nice Jewish kid who likes black people and they would come in, and it would be a stream of them, and have black friends and really feel the black struggle on the acting tip and it's a reason why all of us are not dying in the movie.

I'd never been to acting school, so I never thought I'd get this far.

I've done one movie. And it's not a movie I want to stand on as far as acting ability goes. I mean, I'm not going to win an Oscar anytime soon. I'm not Meryl Streep.

Acting classes, I guess, are good and I would like to maybe sometime take one. But I would feel like I was learning someone else's technique. I like mine.

Bad acting comes in many bags, various odors. It can be performed by cardboard refugees from an Ed Wood movie, reciting their dialogue off an eye chart, or by hopped-up pros looking to punch a hole through the fourth wall from pure ballistic force of personality, like Joe Pesci in a bad mood. I can respect bad acting that owns its own style.

I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous, which is acting, and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics, and I think math is the cat's meow.

I have recently started acting lessons in south France, and I intend to commence acting lessons at Rada.

I was born in San Diego, and we moved to Los Angeles when I was seven. A couple of years later, I started acting!

After this whole acting thing is over and done, you eventually have to be human. Some people are never human. It's very weird.

What is more important than the name is that people know that I really like acting, I enjoy it and I want people to know that I am serious. The name thing: I will always be L.L. Cool J.