Quotes About Acting

In the beginning, I aspired just to make a comfortable living in acting. I still feel the same - it's just that my standards have gone up, so my comfort level is higher as well.

At my school, which was all boys, I played almost exclusively lady parts. When I say lady parts, I mean parts that were ladies. To actually play lady parts would be weird, even by English standards.

What I find so special about acting - especially being female in this world, and growing up with such intense standards of how you should be - is that you can break those rigid models.

'The Machinist' changed me. I learned that I really enjoy, literally, not saying a damned word for days at a time, except for what was in the scene. Whole days of... nothing. Just... standing still. I know a lot of people found it bizarre, because they'd be standing right next to me thinking, 'Why aren't we talking? What's going on?'

I say that I played a doorstop in Dune because I remember standing around a lot. I was down there for months.

'Last Man Standing' is overall a lot of comedy. And I love doing that.

'Days of Our Lives' was an insane schedule. You're doing a whole one-hour show in a day. You do a very cursory run-through with the director telling you where you're going to be standing, then you do a quick rehearsal on camera and you shoot it.

Intimate scenes on a movie set are just dry, bizarre things; people standing around.

I very much prefer the balance in a scene to standing out and so you have to make a decision.

The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

To have an opportunity to get in front of a camera every single day is just priceless because it gets you closer and closer to being less self-consciousness in front of it and really being human and really making choices and standing by them.

It's hard to get lost in a scene, to get into a character when everyone's standing around you on the set.

There's nothing fun about 30 people standing around watching you, like, pretend to pleasure someone. Nothing enjoyable about it, believe me.

From an acting standpoint, when I was a kid, I thought I knew everything there was to know. As the years go by, this craft becomes more intensive as I get older. You realize how much more there is to know and to learn, and how much better you can get, if you really work at it.

I approach these people from a standpoint of love. How were they loved? How do they love? What's going on in their heart? There's that that I think about with every role.

Acting is very sacred. Anyone who stands in front of a crew with the camera recording their emotions is a brave individual.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

I've done everything in the theatre except marry a property man.

You ever spent eight hours acting in water? It's a lot easier to get in and out of a bath. Hot tubs are bad news for actors, man.

I'm very fond of doing movies where men fight over me. I don't get to do enough.

Living in somebody else's pain for an actor man, it's actually nice when you get to feel that kind of emotion. That's what I like.

Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.

I love acting because it's a bit of an escape. It gives you the ability to reinvent yourself. They say that acting is the shy man's revenge.

I lost 30 pounds to play my character in 'The Mexican,' but people don't take to skinny mafia men, and I don't feel right when I'm thin.