Top 12 Quotes & Sayings by Larry Moss

One of the most important things I've learned about acting is that you can't separate how you live your life and how you practice your art.

You must create the character's internal life. What do I mean by internal life? I mean the thoughts, feelings, memories, and inner decisions that may not be spoken. When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances, we can see them thinking. We're interested in what they're experiencing that may never be spoken, that quality of nonverbal expression - which is as much a part of the characters as breathing and as real as what they say and do. This is their internal life. It helps us believe in the characters and care about them.

The rules are what make us better.

Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.

Everything I'm teaching you about acting has one aim only: to fire you up emotionally and behaviorally so that you can give a vivid, involving, and memorable performance.

A good or great performance is like peeling an onion; in every scene you reveal another layer, something the audience hasn't seen until then. They stay involved because they are constantly learning about and discovering the character they are watching. They can't take you for granted and it keeps them hooked.

Acting is a spiritual quest to touch human beings.

That's what our work can do: we remind people that things can change, that wounds can heal, that people can be forgiven, and that closed hearts can open again.

You're not simply entitled to be an actor - you're not an actor just because you call yourself one - you earn it. You earn it by working.

It's not enough to identify the Superobjective intellectually; you have to justify it, to find the emotional drive behind it. You need your own specific interpretation of the superobjective so that every time you think of it, it makes you emotional and drives you into action.

You can't play an emotional condition; you have an emotional condition, and because you have that condition, you try to overcome it with active doings (intentions).

I call this book The Intent to Live because great actors don't seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living.