ACTING AND ACTORS

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.
Henri Frederic Amiel

From fifty feet away, even with the lights all over it, you're not gonna see it.
Anonymous

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.
Bette Davis

The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.
Thomas Campbell

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
Aldous Huxley

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You are not in business to be popular.
Kirstie Alley

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.
Samuel Johnson

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

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.
Alva Johnson

Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that's about all there is to it.
John Huston

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.
Washington Irving

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.
Kevin Kline

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]
Tom Selleck

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- tripping on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Leif the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
William Shakespeare

She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity -- and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the ''woman of wax'' whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.
Marguerite Duras

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
Bertolt Brecht

I can't tell you how many shows I've done with full-blown migraine headaches.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas

The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.
Peter (Stephen Paul) Brook

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.
Dorothy Parker

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.
Mary Tyler Moore

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.
Bill Vaughan

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

The most minor gifts and not a very high class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
Katharine Hepburn

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

You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film -- you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
Daniel Day Lewis

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of ''artistic'' expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.
Patrick Kavanagh

An actor is only merchandise.
Chow Yun-Fat

Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.
Jim Carrey

We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
William Hazlitt

I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.
Glenn Close

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.
Skeet Ulrich

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful -- my personal life suffers.
Al Pacino

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
Uta Hagen

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary clichT. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men's relations with women.
Camille Paglia

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.
Forest Whitaker

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Paul Newman

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head -- remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.
Brandy

Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robust periwig-pated fellow, tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.
William Shakespeare

An actress must never lose her ego -- without it she has no talent.
Norma Shearer

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

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.
Jean-Claude Van Damme

I have to act to live.
Sir Lawrence Olivier

Actors are one family over the entire world.
Alfre Woodard

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.
Marlon Brando

This is not a tough job. You read a script. If you like the part and the money is O.K., you do it. Then you remember your lines. You show up on time. You do what the director tells you to do. When you finish, you rest and then go on to the next part. That's it.
Robert Mitchum

All men practice the actor's art.
Petron

I'm not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.
Sylvester Stallone

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.
Jeanne Moreau