Top 1200 Actors And Acting Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

I feel like this is the way I was meant to interact with acting. Which is as a director, and helping, working with actors to find their way. Facilitating their performances is so satisfying for me.

I think I've grown up in an era where character acting on film has become less desirable for the producers and directors and therefore the audience. They have got used to the people that those actors really are.

My favorite acting books are Stella Adler's 'The Art of Acting' and 'Sanford Meisner on Acting.'

My abject hatred of actors and the acting world. I went to college as an actor, and halfway through, I switched to playwriting and directing. Then I spent a couple years working in publishing, doing some freelance journalism for The Village Voice and Musician magazine. I thought my life was going to be as a writer, but then I realized I missed performing, so I got into comedy. It was a nice combination of things I was sort of good at. I was a pretty good writer and a decent actor, but I didn't really like acting, and I didn't have the discipline to be a writer.

I do not know if it is true that all actors want to direct and all directors want to act, but in 1972 I tried directing and decided I had better stick to acting.

She didn't need to go to acting school to learn that the essence of acting is to act like you're not acting.

It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.

With 'Avatar,' you're beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.

You cannot study acting in books. Do it, do it, do it. And watch good actors. See what they are doing and how they are doing it. You have to practically participate, I think, in order to develop yourself.

I think good actors are born with a kind of native gift. When you study too much with an acting teacher, that gets taken away. You lose your sense of spontaneity.

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

Any youngster who comes to me and says he wants to act, I tell him to complete his education first because, for too long, uneducated actors have ruled the roost in the acting world.

I always go for just really, hopefully, great writing and great acting, being in the company of great actors.

Now that I'm acting, I've realized that I don't have a lot of barriers. Certain actors have a hard time with anger or with joy or with whatever, and, I don't know, I don't seem to have those barriers.

Honestly, acting is the most work when you're unemployed. For me, the actual acting part is never hard. It's the politics and basically everything around the acting that is difficult.

I took my first acting classes in Portland at Portland State University and the Portland Actors Conservatory.

Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.

What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can't buy talent, so it's best to leave the word 'great' out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

I love acting. Acting is a true love of mine, acting and math. Although they are both creative, they use very different sides of your brain. And I love both. Acting is my first love, and that's my main career, it really is.

Seeing a film at the cinema, or a DVD or whatever at home, your brain is really receptive to not only whether the script's working, or if the actors are acting well, but also the colours.

After working with so many great actors and acting students in film school, it was a whole other thing working with Luke [Kirby].

[This kind of strange mythology about me.] I've pulled a huge steamboat over a mountain; I've done a feature film with all the actors acting under hypnosis - things that are very unusual.

There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.

The actors in Britain are incredible, and I didn't appreciate that until I got there. They interpret your words and you realize how deliberate and thoughtful they are. There are great American actors, too, don't get me wrong, but the technique that British actors have is something really special.

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.

I always say if you've seen good acting on television, those actors are really good. Because there's just not enough time. You don't have any preparation.

Some of the best times I've ever had in my life have been because of acting and through acting. But I'm not interested in the game of acting and being an actor and auditioning and all that stuff.

I've dealt with a few method actors, and I don't know if should say this, but I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I think it's film acting and you just have to be on when the camera is rolling.

My first job was a film called 'Storm Damage' for the BBC. I was 16 and working with really respected British actors. I didn't have an agent at the time, and it kind of threw me into real acting.

I love working with actors. I grew up with a lot of actors. All my friends are actors. I love that process.

A Murphy [Eddie Murphy] movie is like a Sidney Poitier comedy - he's that intensely good... He revolutionized acting. He's literally black Brando. Before Eddie Murphy, there were two schools of acting for a black actor: Either you played it LIKE THIS or youplayeditlahkdis. He was the first black guy in a movie to talk like I am talking right now. That did not exist for black actors before him.

I believe, and this is perhaps too nationalistic a view, that the American style of acting puts actors quickly in touch with each other, so that their continuous presence in a company, as in England, is not absolutely necessary.

I understand acting and I understand actors. I don't really understand the world of celebrity. That's just bizarre. Those sorts of elements I'm at sea with.

Most actors are starving. Most of us are walking around with a flashlight and tweezers looking for evidence. When you have someone that actually writes an acting role, it's rare.

I have some friends who are actors. I've watched them work. And I would say that of all the arts, acting is the most grueling, thankless. Never apologize for your work.

I learned early on to abandon all those preconceived notions you have about other actors and it's served me really well. I usually just try to empty my mind of that. I love meeting actors and I love working with actors.

Unlike Texas Rangers, we actors don't have a stop date, so I don't know about retiring. Sometimes I want to stop acting, but then you get a good script!

I thought acting was all about natural instinct but I've realised, through working with so many talented actors on 'Wild Swans' and 'Run,' that I can see the training. That's why I am back at drama school.

Although we're acting, and our minds know that we're acting, our bodies don't quite know that we're acting. So even when you're watching someone acting like they're dying, your body has like a true real response to it.

I'm a theater actress and I thrive on working with other actors, and you can't be even a smidge bad, when you're acting with Charlie [Sheen]. He's just so natural, so present and so good that you have to step up to his level, or else.

I've heard New York actors say Chicago actors intimidate them because apparently we're the real nitty-gritty actors who're in a town where being onstage doesn't necessarily get you anything except your craft.

I entered the acting world at a time when there was a higher demand for Middle Eastern actors in the post-9/11 world, and yeah, the roles weren't great.

There is a class system in acting just like in anything else. Black females fall in a category below black male actors.

There are some actors that are great stars and storytellers, but not necessarily good actors. I'm talking about some - not all - of the people you see in action flms or blockbusters. They're film stars, though not necessarily great actors. And there are those who are great actors, but not necessarily big film stars. Jim Sturgess is both. He's quite obviously a star, the audience likes him, he's a great storyteller and he turned out to be one of the greatest actors I've worked with as well.

I never felt fanboyish about acting, about actors, about movies. I'm a fanboy with music.

If I spent all my time criticising myself, I wouldn't be able to function. There are actors who theorise till the cows come home. I haven't the patience for them. It's maybe shallow, but that's why I'll never be part of the acting set.

I like to work and there's no movies for actors, period, especially black actors. When white actors are like, 'Man, there's no work out there,' then black actors are like, 'Are you kidding me?'

It may seem that with the new breed of actors - Arjun, Varun, Siddharth, Ayushmann, Sushant - there is suddenly too much of a hustle to make space for oneself, but acting is subjective. And we motivate one another.

Actors may not realize the extent of their own power. Acting is creation. It's them bringing their own stuff, letting it marinate in their soul, in their creative engine.

When I got into the movie business, working with actors was the one thing I was really weak at. I didn't know what to say to actors. They scared me and intimidated me. The actors that I've worked with who have had a lot of experience, or who I've even grown up watching as a kid, were really scary. I was like, "What am I going to say to this person?" But, I've matured. It's fun. I understand what actors do now.

Live-action is more fun for me, because you're acting with people. When you do voice-acting, many times you're not even in the room with the person that you're acting with.

People claim that no good actors came out of FTII after Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi. What they don't know is that the acting course was closed for 26 years and reopened only in 2004.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of acting: character acting and lead acting. And in my life, to begin with, in the 1980s, it was all character acting. And then when, by fluke, through 'Four Weddings', I got into doing lead parts, it's a completely different thing.

The actor has to have some degree of craft, along with the talent. No one tries to laugh except bad actors. No one tries to cry except bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. Most people don't know that, and most actors don't do that. Therefore, there are a lot of actors who put me to sleep, that are considered good actors, but they're predictable and boring. I know how the scene is going to end before it ends.

Over the years, I have realized that there's more to a film's fate than just good acting and a solid script. It needs to be marketed well. It's the package that sells - the songs, action, actors, etc.

So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.

I think a lot of actors, especially actors with a theater background, have a musical ear. A lot of actors just want to be musicians anyway, and a lot of musicians want to be actors.