Acting Quotes

I think my being such a nomad let me into acting. I was always having to create a new image whenever we moved.

Making films is no longer a way of acting, it is a way of life.

But acting is very much a profession that is you're hot one moment and not the next - and that is totally cool. I think that's what I find most fascinating and most exciting about it - is that it can be gone in a puff of smoke.

I really love to act; I love everything about it. I've never had this addiction to being known. I mean, sure, if you go into acting, there's part of you that is saying, 'I want attention' but I was brought up to work to deserve attention, and it is the work, not the trappings that are important.

It was always acting, singing and dancing that I loved.

I want to die in the saddle. I love writing, producing, acting, directing.

I was a hostess in a restaurant in New York when I was 21, and I was too good of an employee. I was putting most of my energy into that instead of acting. But my father told my sister and me to look at whatever needed to be done and do that job well, no matter what it was.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

Maybe studios don't want to see women acting in a way that isn't womanly. Maybe people don't.

I hadn't done just a straight-out comedy in a long time, just letting an ensemble do really good character acting, having them carry the movie as in my earlier pictures.

I started studying acting, got commercials, and here we are 100 years later. I'm acting and writing and I have a pool and a dog.

Acting is fantastic, but to be able to create a whole world on celluloid is amazing. It's like taking your dreams straight from your head and projecting them onto a screen.

I've never been a really big fan of theatre. I don't know why. It's so much for effort. It's much more difficult for me than stage acting just because of the pressure that's piled on you and you have to learn the entire performance by heart.

I just let the work speak for itself. An actor is not afraid to take risks; to put on different hats; to be a good guy, a bad guy, a victim, an abuser. There are all kinds of people in the world, and playing them is what acting is all about.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that.

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.

One of the cruelest judgments sustained against me is that I have spoken out as a recovered alcoholic to stimulate my acting career.

No, my mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.

There is no right in acting.

At school there was no acting to be had other than school plays which I did now and again.

It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes.

There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life.

Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.

I'm just starting to scratch the surface of what really makes me happy and it's taken me a while to admit that acting like a little child and being a jerk and a punk is fun.

Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me.

I was like the class clown in school so I guess I would say I did like the attention. In church I did a lot of plays, my mother made me play characters, do a lot of drama and acting, trying to become someone else. So it helped me create who I am, to create Snoop Dogg.

I used to go home at night and just shake, because I had no idea that's what acting was gonna be.

I enrolled in an acting workshop and my first acting role was on the TV soap opera 'Melrose Place.'