Quotes About Acting

'The Hobbit' was one of the first biggish books I ever read. I remember vividly the 'riddles in the dark' passage, and it meant a lot to me to finally get to play it after all these years.

I still vividly remember when I was working in 'Kashmir Ki Kali,' I had no idea about lip-syncing the song 'Diwana Hua Badal' sung by Asha Bhosle and the scene was to be shot in the Dal Lake in Kashmir.

When I'm 19, I'll still be living with my mom, but I'm going to be doing music and acting. I can picture it really vividly.

It's advice I always give to directors when they're starting out: Take an acting class to really see what it feels like to be an actor. And I have always felt like one of my strengths as a director is that I share a language and a vocabulary with actors.

While you're testing out armatures of puppets, you're also trying to find the proper visual vocabulary for the character and to come up with a guidebook of sorts for how a character will move and act.

Voice acting is very different from live-action. You only have one tool to convey emotion. You can't sell a line with a look. It's all about your vocal instrument.

The American actor is much more used to being physically relaxed and using their bodies better, and English actors are a little bit unrelaxed, but they're better at vocal technique.

I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.

I grew up with the great Sir Laurence Olivier, and I think it's fair to say that a lot of actors of my age were influenced by his very individual vocal delivery. He was a showman who would always play to the gallery.

From about ten, I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I started doing vocal shows and stuff.

You need to make sure you're doing vocal warmups and drinking tea - and if you have a really emotional scene, you have to make sure to take care of yourself afterwards.

Every night in 'Hairspray' we will be doing a vocal warmup, so I hope that will improve the muscles. It is a muscle, and we've not been using it - anybody that is on stage, that is.

Film is something that came later into my life. I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation.

I've never felt that acting was my vocation - never had that tortured thing. I love acting, but it doesn't feed my soul.

I had a Jesuit education, and I consider acting and the theater as kind of a calling - a vocation.

I think it's a falsehood to think you can have some kind of plan. Acting isn't like that, it's more vocational, I think.

When I decided I wanted to go to drama school, I realized that a lot of the actors whose careers I really admire and whose work I really admire were English and English trained. I felt there was a real vocational feel to work in the U.K.

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.

Ever since I was 16, I've had this lower register, what I thought was a very manly voice, and I was insecure about that. But once I started acting more, I realized it was an asset, and I didn't want to force myself to aim for the highest note possible.

As an actor, you're trying to capture the nuances of real life, but voice work is almost over-acting.

With voice over work, you need to convey as much emotion as you can without making any physical movements, so it's hard. You've got to visualize everything.

When I first went to acting school, they made me lose my accent, which is very upsetting for me. The first day of Shakespeare class, I remember the professor was like, 'Oh, boy. Oh no, no, no, no. No, no, no,' and sent me to a voice and speech class to get rid of the accent immediately.

I have to say that getting to tackle Maria in 'The Sound of Music' at Carnegie Hall was surreal. When I heard my voice, it was all I could do to keep myself from doing a British accent and sound like Julie Andrews!

With voice overs... you're not thinking about the camera. So your voice becomes this thing that you can manipulate. And depending on the character you're doing, it's all concentration on your voice.