A Quote by James Cagney

You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.

James Cagney

Quote Topics

Acting Audience Directly Myself Psych Them Things Up Yourself

Quote Author

James Cagney
American - Actor
July 17, 1899 - March 30, 1986

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Richard Foreman

I used to psych myself up before the show and now I do the complete opposite: I psych myself down. It's 12:30 at night, you don't want some guy yelling at you. You want some guy just talking to you.

Craig Ferguson

You get to keep acting on the feelings you had just moments before. You don't have to psych yourself up for the scene. You can just go off what you were already feeling.

Taissa Farmiga

If you don't know yourself, if you don't control yourself, if you don't have mastery over yourself, it's very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way.

Stephen Covey

The biggest challenge is learning how to psych yourself up into believing in yourself as you walk into the Octagon.

Jon Jones

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor

Rex Harrison

I love acting. Modeling is fun, too, but I feel like there is more room to stretch yourself and open yourself up to new experiences with acting. That's why I got into acting in the first place.

Arden Cho

I never like to play for myself, and that is why I don't own a grand piano. To play for yourself is like looking at yourself in a mirror. I like to practice; that is to work at a task. But to play there must be an audience. New things happen when you play for an audience. You don't know what will occur. You make discoveries with the music, and it is always the first time. It is an exchange, a communion.

Hephzibah Menuhin

Psych yourself up until you're confident that the world will be interested in what happens to your characters. Confidence is key.

Deborah Moggach

I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.

Antonio Banderas

The way I dress depends on how I feel. I never have to psych myself up. Usually it just feels like it works.

Rihanna

I sign up whatever live shows I get simply because every gig is a chance to reach out directly to the audience. When it comes to gigs, I try mixing personal picks with what the audience demands.

Amit Trivedi

When you do improv, you're everything. You're a performer, writer, and director, because you're moving the scene in the direction you want it to go, you're making it up as you go, and you're acting it. You're all of those things, so I always viewed myself that way. And with the films I've done, I've written on them, I've acted in some of them. And even ones I haven't acted in, I've acted them out just to be sure another actor can do them.

Rob Reiner

Both me and Edgar are firm believers in never underestimating or talking down to an audience, and giving an audience something to do, to give them something which is entirely up to them to enter into the film and find these hidden things and whatever.

Simon Pegg

Theratre is not like like in film and TV, where you have to stop and go back and keep redoing the same three pages for two hours. You get to go through the whole 80 pages of the script, which is incredible. You get to keep acting on the feelings you had just moments before. You don't have to psych yourself up for the scene. You can just go off what you were already feeling.

Taissa Farmiga

At the end of the day, stand-up comedy is like acting when the audience are the other characters that I'm acting with.