Quotes About Acting

So I view acting as a thoroughly involved performance with the maximum of sincerity and devotion.

All my roles to date have been different and I thoroughly enjoyed doing them.

I don't like to spend a lot of money on haircuts: I'll sometimes grow my hair and get an acting job and get them to cut it for free. I think for a lady, though, it's okay to spend a lot on a haircut.

He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.

My thing about looking good is that it should be the character. If I'm playing a character who's concerned about his body - an athlete, say - I'll get in shape. If I'm playing a character who doesn't or wouldn't, I don't. I almost never get in shape for a movie, even though I know it would be a good career move.

I'd like to play Ian Paisley, actually. I'd need building up, though he's very frail now.

The hardest achievement in acting - in my opinion, anyway - is nailing a role that absolutely nobody else could have played. Pacino owned Michael Corleone... but DeNiro could have owned it as well. Who else, though, but Val Kilmer could have nailed Jim Morrison? Does anyone besides Will Ferrell pull off Ron Burgundy?

I don't know why I'm suddenly playing nasty people. It is very fun, though, and it isn't real, at the end of the day.

I am not a method actor, though I studied for a year with Lee Strasburg.

I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?

I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.

I'm 64 years old, and I've been acting now for 42 years. Only recently have I thought to myself, 'Hmmm, it may be interesting to start directing.'

When I was filming, I imagined that Legolas was a meditative character who was very thoughtful and had a certain amount of depth to him. I started working on trying to find this focus that Legolas has, which wasn't really like me.

Sometimes the hardest part I think for actors on '24' is some of the jargon and getting the ideas and the thoughts and the information out quickly enough and succinctly enough and clearly enough.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

Acting gives you freedom to express your thoughts.

As a kid, I was always very shy growing up - I wasn't very good at articulating my thoughts or my feelings. Now that I'm older, I found acting to do that. So it's been an amazing way to sort of express who I am.

I'm a massive daydreamer. I'm constantly lost within my own fantasies and my own thoughts personally, and I think maybe that is sort of represented in what we do for a living, the fact that we make believe everything and we escape into these other characters for a living.

Acting was just another part of my life, as it still is today. It's 1 of the 10 things I love doing. It's never just been my life. As cheesy as it sounds, all my eggs were never in just one basket. I had a thousand baskets going on.

Tisch has a great film program and a great acting program, but they are segregated; you don't really intertwine. My peers knew I liked acting, so they'd be like, 'Go get that guy Gubler. He'll be in your student film.' I was in the same building. I became their go-to guy. So I left NYU having been in probably one thousand short films.

I wouldn't go up on a stage now if you paid a thousand dollars for one minute of acting. It's a nasty experience. You're up there all by yourself. You're so damn exposed.

I have read a thousand screenplays, and I have acted in a handful of them, and I have felt when it feels good, the writing, and it feels natural, and feels funny or sad or honest or whatever it may be. You connect. And I felt when it feels like writing, when it feels stale, or when it feels artificial or forced, or too theatrical or whatever.

My point is that, over the years, I've taught five thousand people acting and lately I have a lot of energy on these kids, having the same break I had as a high school girl.

It is so fantastic being an actress because you have the chance to be a thousand different people when you act.