Quotes About Acting

I did a lot of acting when I was a child. I was very shy - the kind of kid who ran into a corner and cried on parents' visiting day.

The first time I ever actually had a line was on 'A Different World', my best friend Cree Summer's show. I was in L.A. visiting her, and she said, 'Hey, there's a walk-on part, why don't you audition for it?'

I want to continue acting as long as I can because being on the sets is a big stress buster for me. I can't possibly think of stopping my visits to the sets because I'm old.

When '36 Chowringhee Lane' was released in 1981, I was a student of the Film and Television Institute of Tamil Nadu. Everyone who had seen the film was very impressed with its flawless direction and acting. But we, cinematography students, were stunned by the visual style, which was truly international.

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

I'm not a huge kind of visual director. For me, it's all about the acting. There's no greater buzz than working with actors and seeing what they can do and how much they can improve on what you'd written. That will always be on the top of my list. It's a real privilege to see it live before anyone else sees it.

Portraying visual impairment is difficult. I can see what's going on, but I have to act like I can see nothing. And this can be quite a challenge.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

The movies are all about visual, and television is all about character and dialogue.

I never had any preconceived ideas about acting, because I always thought I was going to be a visual artist.

Technically, the green screen acting can be difficult because there's something worse than a tennis ball on the end of a stick; it's an Australian visual effects assistant running around a field with a cardboard dinosaur head on the end of a stick while wearing sandals.

It comes down to something really simple: Can I visualize myself playing those scenes? If that happens, then I know that I will probably end up doing it.

I created the characters from what I read in the script. I decided how I should talk, accent, no accent, my own voice, or a created voice. Then, I visualize what I should look like.

The first thing I do with any script is read it and try to visualize if I can play the character - if I can feel what the character's feeling.

Everything about video games has changed. The writing, the acting, the visuals, obviously - everything has gone to a new level. And the difference that I see as an actor is that I don't have to push that extra bit to sell what's going on.

Making the visuals photo-realistic lets us do things we were never able to do before. The voice acting, the facial expressions, are all that much deeper.

Training is vital. You need to know the technical aspects of acting, just in case someone hands you a monologue and simply says, 'Cry here and laugh here.' You have to be able to make sense of it all.

It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being.

I got a chance to act, and I have to say that acting is extremely fun and vital.

Developing aesthetic sense is vital for actors. They must understand that there is no small role, only small actors. A good actor will do the smallest role to perfection, and be recognised.

I play characters, and I try to play them in a manner that's appropriate to the script. Physical movement and vitality of language is part of character.

I don't have tremendous physical vitality since I had a neck operation, and I'm more aware than I used to be of the tedium of acting.

Friends told me not to bother with the silents - they're jerky, poorly photographed and ludicrously badly acted. But I was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of these films.

Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root-canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon.