Actor Quotes

I'm still a promising actor. It's better to be climbing even if you have a lot of falls than to be descending. Maybe that's kept me young. I haven't gotten to any peak yet.

As an actor, when you encounter a psychopathic personality, you naturally want to make him 'bigger than life,' as the Americans say.

There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic.

To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new.

I try to do as many stunts as they'll let me do. I think it's important for an audience to feel that the actor's really doing it.

I'm an actor and this is a role I'm playing. But people can get wacky.

I'm forever testing myself. As a person and as an actor, I have no sense of competition.

I've made the transition from star to character actor and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.

The first actor I ever saw was The Lone Ranger. I thought, That's what I want to do.

The difference between a movie star and a movie actor is this - a movie star will say, 'How can I change the script to suit me?' and a movie actor will say. 'How can I change me to suit the script?'

The three actors I admire the most are all dead. Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy and the French actor, Jean Gabin. They're all very natural, sort of masculine without being overly macho.

As an actor, I'll play anything.

An actor without an audience is rehearsing.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.

I actually wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be an actor.

I went to Queen's University Belfast and stayed nine months, then I ran away to be an actor.

There are not that many jobs as an actor where you don't get to know what your character will be doing from episode to episode.

Everybody wants to be a Bond villain. That is the coolest. To be able to portray a Bond villain, that is the feather in any actor's cap.

My journey has been that of a character actor.

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.

And I have been able to establish this sort of decent reputation as being a decent character actor.

But the one thing that I did do was establish myself as a good actor.

I think that being a producer is business and being an actor is art.

I don't have any expectations as an actor, and being rich and famous is not my driving force.

It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realised I'd become an actor.

The best thing an actor can be is ready. Be flexible, be ready.

I'm not attracted to naturalism, I'm not attracted to behavior, I'm attracted to dance. I'm attracted to gesture, I'm attracted to singing with your voice, as opposed to having a natural manner. I'm a theater actor first, so that probably influences a lot of my approach. And I think in many ways, naturalism has ruined movies.

All the time, as an actor, you want to be asking what's next and where things are going. If you're not asking those questions, you're not growing.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.

In a weird way, I live vicariously through the characters I play as an actor.

I grew up in a family of actors. I grew up onstage. The choice for me wasn't, 'Do I want to be an actor or not?' I always felt like that's just ingrained in you, the need to perform. The choice was, 'Do you want to do this professionally or not?'

I phoned this number and said, Please, sir, I want to be an actor.

You have to be selfish to be an actor.

I knew I wanted to be an actor when I was growing up, really. So when I decided to go to university instead of drama school, it was with the intention of becoming an actor afterwards.

I finally realized that yeah I did want to be an actor and it wasn't out of habit, but I needed to grow up for myself and then kind of re-enter the industry with a sound understanding of what my sensibilities and my values are as a relatively formed human being.

I got an agent when I was 12, and I started working in more amateur productions well before that. But even as a kid, I never felt like a kid actor, you know? I always took myself kind of absurdly seriously.

There's certainly something very uncomfortable about the voyeurism involved in being in the press, being an actor, where people have a seemingly insatiable curiosity about, you.

Every actor just wants good writing.

I just never did buy this idea that you have to live in Los Angeles to be an actor. I didn't see that as a requirement in my job description.

On cable now, the writer is king. Any actor chases that.

I feel a little guilty only being an actor.

I've wanted to be an actor ever since I was a little boy.

I didn't really have any aspirations to do TV when I first decided to be an actor.

As an actor, I was just satisfied to work.

Commercial jobs are pretty easily adjustable because they only take a few hours to complete, which is one of the reasons they are a Godsend to the actor.

Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication.

To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.

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.

If you catch me saying 'I am a serious actor,' I beg you to slap me.

I feel like I've finally made it as an actor. I've been doing this for years and you don't always make a movie that everybody likes.

I honestly think I'm just an actor. It doesn't matter the medium. I can go on stage and be happy, I can be on TV and be happy.

I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium.

I think every actor wants to be an FBI or cop at one point.

I'm an actor and it happened to go my way that day.

Nothing is harder than working with an actor who doesn't take it seriously or show up in the same way that you are.

The frustrating part of being a movie actor is waiting in your trailer to do two takes of a scene you've prepared for two months.

As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that's eccentric, it's totally acceptable - not only that, it's lauded in some perverse way.

As an actor, you have to be open to doing things where you look stupid, to be experimental.

I think every actor has their list of roles that were near misses. I've had my share.

Yeah, I know, any time you hear an actor say, 'I do music', you cringe. But I want to be gradual with my music. I want to earn my stripes.

As an actor, you're trained to do the right thing, be politically correct, say your lines, say the right thing about the people you're working with.

I love to play different roles. That's just the kind of actor I am.

In order to be a good actor, I'm a firm believer that you need to bring something to the table.

When I was younger I saw a movie called 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Those two actors and that movie was my inspiration to want to be an actor.

As an actor, all you want to do is to work and do good work.

I think the worst thing that can happen to a good actor is fame.

Normally, I rely heavily on my director to massage me out of my actor comfort zones.

I feel my fuller-bodied characters are all in the independent films I do, and in the studio productions, I have to work harder to dimensionalize the characters. And that's certainly part of the job description of an actor - that's what you're supposed to do - but you have to work harder at it in the characters that I've encountered in studio films.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

The only thing we don't do together is get in front of an actor and show any indecision at all about what we think. We don't always agree, so we meet privately, then one or the other will approach the actor.

As an actor we're just like workers in a factory, we provide our services to directors.

An actor is only merchandise.

As an actor we're just like workers in a factory, we provide our services to directors. But I must do my job perfectly, and I love what I do.