Top 1200 Stage Acting Quotes & Sayings

Every time you're on stage, you're acting.

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances.

On some level acting is the art of pretend and you have to have a highly cultivated sense of imagination. You have to be able to see things that aren't there no matter what aspect of acting, whether it's green screen, whether it's on stage, whether it's anything else, whether you're working on the radio.

Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!

Well, acting on stage is very different from acting on screen.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

I dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.

From the first audition on stage, I knew I loved acting.

I grew up in Glen Ellyn, which is about 20 miles west of Chicago. I attended Glenbard South High School and University of Illinois. I didn't study acting until I moved to Los Angeles after college, but the fact that I was raised in the Chicago area set the stage for all of my comedic and acting sensibilities.

I realized that acting is not all about receiving people's applause or cheer. It is about delivering the right character to the audience and feeling satisfied in who you become on stage. Therefore, I try to focus more on the abstract qualities of acting, and I hope to become a better actress throughout time.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

Acting can happen in cinema, on television, on stage.

Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.

It was when I was on stage that I realized that acting could be such a brilliant job.

Acting for screen is very different from acting on stage, and then obviously when you dance... everything is a physical embodiment. But the discipline is the same approach. You have to take both things seriously; nothing well-crafted is by mistake.

I never thought of quitting acting or the stage.

I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage.

I've found acting on stage much more challenging than on screen.

I was new to acting on a stage in a narrative as opposed to acting on a stage as a stand-up. And like everything else it's just like comfort level. The first time I did stand-up I was at a place called the B3 in New York on Third and Avenue B and I not only didn't take the mic out of the stand, but I clutched the stand of the entire time.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

I hadn't really thought about doing any acting at all post-'Center Stage.'

Acting is ephemeral. You can't hang it on a wall. You can't throw it off. And you can't bring it out of a closet. It's there one night and it's gone the next, at least with stage acting anyhow.

When I'm acting, I'm in a different place, singing is the last thing on my mind, and when I'm on stage, there's no acting at all involved, not even presentation, it's just who I am.

I was a law student when I started acting in plays. I was a real estate lawyer but I continued acting on stage because that is what gave me a lot of happiness.

My first love is acting on stage. A sitcom is a hybrid of stage and film.

I reenact everything. I love to paint a picture for my audience. I'm a lot like Richard Pryor in that aspect. I do a lot of acting on stage, acting out and visualizing stuff. I love to do that. I'm into it so much, it just comes out of me.

A lot of the time, you're supposed to play to the top of your intelligence, as truthful as possible. But when you're on stage making people laugh, you're still acting. I think it helped me a bunch to go on stage two or three times a week.

I was more used to acting onstage, for a long time. I don't know, maybe I was temperamentally more suited to stage stuff. And there are things about the stage that I miss in a lot of ways.

What I've found is that stage is very much a foundation of acting. It's where it all began and you're working with that repetition.

One of the things I do tell young women, if they want to pursue a career in acting, is to get good stage training. It is essential to have a good basis in stage technique. You can move into film easily, and acquire more skill and more understanding, but you can't necessarily go the other way around. For women, longevity of career will very much be on stage.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

I feel like my home is stage acting.

There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act.

My wife says that stage acting is like being on a tightrope with no net, and being in the movies, there is a net - because you stop and go over it again. It's very technical and mechanical. On stage you're on your own.

Acting in a stage play is like working the evening shift in an office.

I had a wife and children. I was mostly working in painting and decorating and then taking the occasional acting job as they came along. At that stage in your life you have to think about your priorities. It looked like I was going to have to take the building more seriously and give up acting.

I'm one of relatively few stage-trained actors who doesn't much like acting on stage. It feels kind of like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, which I did when I was eight. When it was all over, I was glad I had done it, but most of the time when it was actually happening, I was just kind of hanging on for dear life.

There's no doubt that I owe a lot to my training of stage acting.

I went to college at NYU for acting, since acting was my dream from very young. I did a lot of hip-hop courses while I was there. I helped co-write a hip-hop production for the main stage of NYU, but I never touched rap.

All I ever wanted to do was be on stage, if possible acting in Shakespeare. And to be as good as I could be.

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 'Twas only when he was off, he was acting.

People talk about the difference between radio acting, TV acting and stage acting, but I think it's all the same. For instance, when I played Vultan in 'Flash Gordon,' I put as much energy into it as I would with 'King Lear' - it's all part of the same thing.

I attend film school, my background is acting and directing. But the acting does best, I like to work on the stage.

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.

Whenever I get on stage, I feel safe and in control. Life can be so uncertain, but on stage, I always know how a drama or crisis is going to end. Acting is a great comfort blanket and has gotten me through countless personal crises. I am a firm believer that the show must go on.

I realized that a dancer's life is very short and I had so much of a creative energy in me that I needed outlets to do other things so that's when I started acting more and it all kind of blended together. When you're on stage you're acting and you're dancing, it started blended together now.

I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.

For me, the real goal is to integrate. The thing that I'm most happy with is the fact that I've been able to keep doing all of it - to keep writing, and to keep acting in movies, and to keep acting on the stage, to keep directing plays. I find that they feed each other, and that I learn about acting from directing and I learn about writing from acting.

On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.

I learned acting by doing it. And although I had never taken an acting class, it didn't take long to learn how to be on the stage. All you have to do is to be humiliated in front of an audience a few times. If you don't like being humiliated publicly, you learn how to act.

On some level, acting is the art of pretend, and you have to have a highly cultivated sense of imagination. You have to be able to see things that aren't there, no matter what aspect of acting, whether it's green screen, whether it's on stage, whether it's anything else, whether you're working on the radio.

Acting is something I did when I was a kid. I do act sometimes in friends' projects, but when I do, it's just for fun. It is actually a hobby for me now. I do still love stage acting, but the day-to-day process of being an actor is so exhausting and so taxing.

Anyone who goes on the stage is a show-off, aren't they? Acting's weird.

I was applying to the art school, but there was a checklist that said I had to do either production design or stage management or acting. I thought, "I don't want to be an actor, but I know production and stage management take acting classes" - this is literally my internal monologue. I was like, "Designers don't have to take acting classes. Cool. I'll check that box".

Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that's the same thing as standup - people are on a stage; they're being seen and saying things - so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

Good acting is good acting, whether it's on stage, on TV, or in films.

I would say acting on stage is my first love.