A Quote by William H. Macy

So many actors spend so much energy trying to remember the lines. It's so foolish. Guys are the worst. — © William H. Macy
So many actors spend so much energy trying to remember the lines. It's so foolish. Guys are the worst.
Too many of us are hung up on what we don't have, can't have, or won't ever have. We spend too much energy being down, when we could use that same energy – if not less of it – doing, or at least trying to do, some of the things we really want to do.
Sometimes actors don't remember their lines. At its worst, this means they 'dry' and silence descends. More commonly, the original lines are paraphrased in some alarming way. It's hard to say which is more painful for the author. Less serious, but quite irritating is to hear the word 'Well' inserted at the beginning of speeches.
Some actors count their lines as soon as they receive a script. I'm the opposite. I try to see how many lines I can whittle down. You can say just as much in 4 as you can in 14.
We spend so much time and expend so much energy trying to gain a sense of worth from othersultimately, only God's opinion of us matters.
You just want to give the team energy and get our guys going in any way possible. So I'm just trying to give off as much energy as I can whenever I can.
The minute I spend any energy defending myself, explaining myself, or in the worst case scenario, trying to please those who are criticizing me, I will, you know, just fall off a cliff.
There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.
So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?
If you've got 15 actors on stage who are all trying to shine a light on themselves, they are all trying to outshine each other. Whereas if you have 14 of those actors trying to shine a light on one person, and each of them is trying to make the other look good, you have a much more interesting process.
I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them....But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember.
I think that for a lot of actors - especially American actors - to get line readings and to be told and have your director literally act out the part for you is sort of discouraging in a way. It's a very Eastern European thing to do - a lot of directors that I worked with in Russia did that as well. And, I never took that as an insult, as many actors tend to do. To me, I think it's just offering a certain energy - offering their flavor - and, instead of trying to sort of decode and communicate it to you, they just show you their flavor of what it should be.
Think about death. You do not know how much time remains to you. And remember that if you do not become different, everything will be repeated again, all foolish blunders, all silly mistakes, all loss of time and opportunity - everything will be repeated with the exception of the chance you had this time, because chance never comes in the same form.You will have to look for your chance next time. And in order to do this, you will have to remember many things, and how will you remember then if you do not remember anything now?
Many people worry so much about managing their careers, but rarely spend half that much energy managing their LIVES. I want to make my life, not just my job, the best it can be. The rest will work itself out.
I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.
There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.
I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.
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