Quotes About Acting

If the man who plays the [...] has talent, he will prove to you by his acting that he is unconscious of any guilt.

If [...] inspiration does not turn up then neither you nor they have anything with which to fill in the blank spaces. You have long stretches of nervous let-down [...], complete artistic impotence, and naïve amateurish sort of acting.

Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human conventions that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage. What happened to you is understandable and excusable in a beginner. But be careful in the future, because amateurish over-acting grows into the worst kind of mechanical acting.

You know now that our work on a play begins with the use of _if_ as a lever to lift us out of everyday life on to the plane of imagination.

I'm not in the business of becoming famous. And that's the advice I give to younger aspiring actors. Work onstage and do the little roles. In the end it's not important to be seen. It's important to do. There's a lot of disappointment in this business, but my family keeps me grounded.

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

I really, specifically, love acting, and I think it's a really cool thing to be really indulgent and follow that. I have a lot of ambitions in life, but for the next few years, I just want to be an actor. That's a lucky opportunity, and that drives me to want to be good at that.

I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.

I wish I had less fear about creating my own parts.

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

I love doing serious movies for adults.

For me, I never, never, from the moment I started acting, had a desire to be famous.

They each closed their closet doors and scampered down the staircase. The guide was just about to close the heavy front door when they reached the downstairs hall and hurried breathlessly out the door. "Thought I'd lost you two," the guide said. "Are you coming down into the basement kitchen with us?" "No thank you," Michele said, "but we enjoyed our tour." It was surely an acting job to say that, she thought.

I got real acting experience, which I'd never had partly because I still wasn't so sure that I wanted to be an actress. But maybe it was something I could do without a high school diploma or accredited skills of any kind whatsoever - a job that would pay me enough of a wage to let me go out into the world and start what I would laughingly come to call my own actual life.

I talked to my agent today. He thinks maybe I should do a television series. I would like to do something where I have to work all the time. Keep my mind off my mind, as it were. Get up real early in the morning, act like someone else all day, and fall asleep at night. A perfect job for me. The fix that doesn't.

standing there beside this king, Han Solo and all the other characters he would eventually play seeded in him now. And then there was me, pregnant with all those people I would play: a vengeful hairdresser, a hostile mother-in-law, a flute-playing adulteress, a psychologist, a drug-addicted writer, a boyfriend-poaching actress, a boy-hungry casting director, myself, an unfaithful wife, an angry boss, myself, myself, myself, myself, and a couple of nuns.

I got my first big paycheck for 'My Best Friend's Wedding.' This was in the days when you actually did get paid to have a supporting role. It just doesn't happen like that anymore, but this was in the '90s. It was the golden age!

I tend to play strong characters and people just assume that I would want to play romantic comedies, which I would love to do, but there are other women that do it so great and they maybe couldn't do what I do, play the kind of characters that I play.

It was really fun being in Tara's trailer, working on my lines. Tara is such an amazing actress. She's so good at what she does. I learned a lot from watching her.

The one thing I learned the most about acting is it takes a tremendous amount of courage to go there and stand still. It takes courage and guts to step out of your mind frame and depict something.

You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational - and probably sexual!

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what actors do.

I think the young actor who really wants to act will find a way ... to keep at it and seize every opportunity that comes along.

Acting is not very hard. The most important things are to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. And if I have to laugh, well, I think of my sex life.