A Quote by Jack Nicholson

It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.
I always had something to think about or draw from, which as an actor is a gift. The beautiful thing about film is that it gets so much closer than stage. I love stage and that's what I started doing and it's a beautiful art form in of itself, but in film you can move your eyes to the side and somehow the audience can fill in the blanks of what you're thinking.
I started in comedy when I first started as an actor on stage and doing improvisational theater and stuff like that. So a lot of people who know me know that sort of side of me. But I got the roles that I got as an young actor kind of steered me in a different direction, which were, at times, darker characters. And so comedy was not something that came easy for people to think of my in those terms.
The great thing about stage is that you have more control. The stage is yours. The time is yours. Film is really the editor's medium.
I didn't always mean to be an actor. I was carried onto the stage when I was two days old, but I never acted as a child. My parents were stage people.
In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.
For me, I wanted to be an actor without being bothered about the medium. So when the opportunity came my way, it did not really matter on which medium I am working.
As a mom, what I found so disturbing were the things that were being said on a national stage - I mean, literally on the stage and off the stage, around the convention about women, about minorities, about Muslims, about immigrants.
There are so many stage actors on TV but you wouldn't know they were stage actors. And film and TV actors are going to the stage as well, so the crossover is great now.
Film's a director's medium. Stage an actor's medium.
It was tough doing 'Underneath the Lintel' in New Jersey in the wintertime, but rewarding. Those audiences were lively and interactive. On-stage was great, but off-stage was difficult.
What do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way, and a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like calendar art next to great paintings. You can't really do very much in movies or in television, but the stage is such an anarchistic medium.
There was once a great actor named George C. Scott. He was on stage in the Delacourt Theater in Central Park, where they do Shakespeare every summer, and he was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. At one point he took the robes he was wearing and just started flipping them up in the air, out of nowhere. And later, an actor said to him, "What was that, George, what were you doing?" And he said, "They were sleeping." You're always trying to catch them.
I'm a stage actor. You know, I was - I cut my teeth on stage, you know. So I've always had a love affair with the stage, first off, what I was raised in, you know.
Actresses are such very dull people off the stage. We are only delightful and brilliant when we are doing what we are told to do. Off stage we are awful chumps.
Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.
The only tool we have as artists is selectivity. If you're a painter, you select the color, the lines, how severe they should be. As an actor you develop how angry you should be. You select how angry you should be. You listen to the other actor and then you react. In film, sometimes the other actor isn't even there. You have to play the scene. What I do is I call on my experience on the stage. I play the scene and I hope that I reach a certain level of integrity because that's what I learned on the stage.
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