Acting Quotes

People always ask me if I'm going to stop modeling because I have started an acting career. I hope to continue to model for years to come.

If you took acting away from me, I'd stop breathing.

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.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

There's nothing more boring than actors talking about acting.

Now my drug is writing or acting, being creative.

If you hang around long enough to show these people what you can do, you have a chance in this acting business.

My mother was a dancer, so I like to use the body as part of the instrument of acting.

For me, acting was a way of taking destructive energy and doing something productive with it, and in that way it was quite a life saver.

Acting with Denzel is like playing tennis with someone that's better than you. You either play better tennis or get blown off the court.

My most useful acting tip came from my pal John Wayne. Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

You don't take a job in acting at all expecting 25 years in and a pension.

I love doing action scenes, there's that great thing when you sort of stop acting because if you're running, you're not acting like you're running, you are just actually running.

I would say critically of myself that I am somebody without secrets. Sometimes acting depends on you having a secret. I don't think I've ever had that.

I've come to this conclusion: What makes a great actor is great need. A huge need of acting.

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

There is a growing frustration that the EU is seen as something that is done to people rather than acting on their behalf. And this is being intensified by the very solutions required to resolve the economic problems.

I've been acting since second grade, and I just remember when I first moved to New York and I was living in Washington Heights with three other actors in this tiny apartment and busting my butt to get to the subway, walking to, like, five auditions in a day.

The feeling of being at sea has put me in touch with who I am to a greater degree than if I had been on land all these years. So, in a roundabout way, I imagine it does inform my acting.

You're being cast for your acting ability. It's not based on the way your body functions. If you're playing a lead in a movie, it's for that character and they'll tailor it to you. In a dance company, you have to fit in a definite mold.

Between 18 and 26 I acted professionally, on the stage and a little bit on television. Acting is okay, but it's quite pressurized. Then I went to England - I wanted to reinvent myself.

There's a great deal of child left in me and acting is fun. It's a make believe thing.

His acting remains forever fixed in a time that never dates.

I love doing scripted things. What little acting ability I have I am holding on with my hangnails.

It appears that Wall Street is not acting as a force for economic expansion, providing access to capital for companies that make things. Rather, it seems, Wall Street is using government bailouts to lever up.

Yes, I made mistakes by rebelling, by acting out in confused ways.

There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people's opinions.

I think personal growth has much to do with acting ability.

Acting is not a mystery. There's nothing that I know that other actors don't know. We all act, we're all actors, we all know the same thing. The only thing that separates us is experience.

I took a route of acting, rather than starmaking, so it cost me a lot financially.

Good acting is consistency of performance.

I've always felt if my nose were more crooked, critics would focus more on my acting.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

You have to believe what you say, and if you believe what you are saying, then acting is easy.

I think what makes a good actor's director is the same thing that makes a good director. Acting is just one of the trades necessary to make a movie.

In my experience it's not essential to get on with the person that you're acting opposite.

Psychology and acting are very closely linked. It's just about studying people and how they work. It can be an incredible discipline and exercise.

When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

Acting is the greatest answer to my loneliness that I have found.

Acting is a humiliating job, from start to finish.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

I think it's a style of acting that you trust. You trust the instincts.

Acting is really only part of my life. I'm addicted to it.

It was in high school that I first became interested in acting. We put on lots of plays.

Maybe subconsciously I've kept activism separate from acting because it's important to me in a more profound way.

I decided I was going to give up singing and concentrate on acting, and a result of that, I didn't do another film for two to three years, and I don't blame it on anybody but myself.

In those days, reserve duty lasted for six years, which, I might add, was three times as long as service in the regular army, although to be perfectly honest, I was unable to fulfill my entire obligation because I was taking acting classes and they said I could skip my last year.

With a recent birthday, I've been acting now for twenty years.

I see myself as a comic but the acting helps sell tickets for gigs.

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.

With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.

My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can't take this on now.

You know, a lot of actors I think go into acting for therapy from whatever trauma has affected them as children. But for me, I think I sought out the drama. That's why I like doing what I do.

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush.

I did a film once that I was killed in. It was a painful, horrifying day. It was a wonderful day from the standpoint of acting, but I was a wreck otherwise.

When I first started acting, I started in opera and had a great desire to play grand, tragic characters. I got sidetracked in musical theater and ended up doing a lot of comedy.

In the world of acting, many are thin but few are talented.

The money is better in films and television. But in terms of acting, theatre is more rewarding.

When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers' films and westerns and stuff like that. That's where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure.

In acting class, you're trained to express yourself as much as you can.

If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life, there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.

The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.

When you're acting in a movie, you never consider the reception of it. It's impossible to predict how something will be received. Even if you think it's the greatest thing in the world, other people might not like it. Or agree with it.

Acting forces me to socialise, which is good for me, I think.

Whether it's music or acting, that creativity all comes from the same source.

I've always had ambition, and the acting was successful and put my name on the map, but it was never the plan to stop there.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

Consequences are unpitying.