Quotes About Acting

Less is more" was one of Meisner's mantras. "Silence has myriad meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning." Most of all, Meisner urged his students to think of acting a role as "living truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.

I always tell actors not to use their face for nothing. Don't start scribbling on the paper until you have something to write.

This is as good a place as any to insist that all the characters in Evangellyfish are fictional, and I made them all up out of my own head. Any resemblance to any real people, living or dead, is their own darn fault. If they quit acting like that, the resemblance would cease immediately and we wouldn't have to worry about it.

Working on 'Gossip Girl' was a fantastic experience. It was my first real gig and I'm thankful for it - I got to learn a lot. I'm glad I got to explore getting comfortable in my own shoes in the background on a show like 'Gossip Girl.'

I don't mind a little Sturm und Drang. When I was doing 'Riding in Cars With Boys ' I wouldn't smile at anybody, because my character, Bev, was angry at the world. I'm the opposite. Inside my head I'd be like, God, I'll explain to you at the end of shooting that I'm not this person.

Being a Barrymore didn't help me, other than giving me a great sense of pride and a strange spiritual sense that I felt OK about having the passion to act. It made sense because my whole family had done it and it helped rationalise it for me.

And maybe now it's about telling the occasional story that I recently believe in and think would be good to put out there into the world. But I look back, that crying taught me how to approach everything in life. Acting or Otherwise.

So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.

I managed to stay grounded and when I wasn't working, I was hanging out with my friends so I was still able to be a kid and have that part of my life. I didn't let acting take over completely.

One of the most important things I've learned about acting is that you can't separate how you live your life and how you practice your art.

I was like, what the hell is my life coming to? I'm a trained actor! I've done Shakespeare and here I am having farting contests with an imaginary dog!

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don't ordinarily call upon in your personal life.

I will always do stand-up, even if my acting career takes off. Stand-up is my life.

In acting, I always try to go back to what would actually be the real situation, the real human behavior in life.

I spend my working life pretending to be someone else.

In real life I'm very low-key. A wallflower. One of the reasons I went into comedy and acting was that I was sick of being shy.

He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next

'Grease' is one of the movies that made me want to be an entertainer, and I have literally been waiting my whole life to play Sandy.

In 'Imitation of Life', I was showing how a girl might feel under the circumstances, but I am not showing how I felt.

I think the most interesting question is, why do you act? I act because I have felt in acting some of the most free moments of my life...I think it's also one thing that scares me the most.

I punch a lot of guys on set. It's much easier than in real life as your hands don't hurt afterwards. The key is that you miss.

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time.

God's Word does not merely impart information; it actually creates life. It's not only descriptive; it's effective too, God speaking is God acting.

Yeah, it's fun to be somebody you're not, to bring a character to life.