Top 1200 Stage Acting Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

I'm not an angry person, just very disappointed and contemptuous of my fellow humans' choices - and on stage those feelings sometimes are exaggerated for a theatric stage - you're on a stage you have an audience of 2500 or 3000 people: you need to project the feelings, the emotions it's heightened, and people mistake it for a personal anger but it's more dissatisfaction, disappointment and contempt for these things we've settled for.

Everybody used to say going to restaurants... is like theater, there's stage sets, there's drama, there's play acting and you watch the show. And now, boy, everything's just become so serious. And you sit at the counter and the chef comes out and tells you what he did to the Brussels sprouts leaves and no, there's not a lot of dancing.

Before I even knew what that half of my family did, I was interested in performing. I remember being seven years old and up on a stage and loving it. I've always adored it. Not just acting, but the whole process of writing and directing movies, everything that has to do with that part of life. Maybe it's in my blood.

Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too.

Acting, when you don't want to do it or you disagree with everything, is almost like having sex with someone you don't like. I had one experience like that on stage, in a terrible version of The Cherry Orchard. I put on a wig, dark-coloured contacts and just hoped no one would recognise me.

There's no truth in acting, it's all a trick, because you go on stage in front of sets, you're on film - it's all a trick. I'm making it sound very - I really am demystifying it, but what I try to do, what I do, and I hope effectively, is to create a reality as if it is happening now, that you're fishing for words out of the air.

If you want to do standup, you have to go on stage. That's the only way to get good - stage times.

I know that one of my difficulties as an actor is to try to do too much, from all those years ago when my acting took place live on a stage. It was just my shiny face there, so you've gotta be super careful how much over-expressing you're doing with your eyes and nose and so on.

Audience participation should extend from on-stage to backstage to under the stage

I was trained on the stage, and I can do stage as well as I can do movies, but I prefer films.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

That's the thing about stage: It's something you can't find anywhere else. It's a two-and-a-half, three-hour experience, and it's a real relationship. You're sending out energy from the stage, but the audience is giving you back so much also, so that's also lifting you and pushing you forward as you're performing and giving you so much energy. You can't find it anywhere else, and that's why people get addicted to being on stage, and when they're not on stage are kind of looking for that and constantly searching for it.

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

On stage I try to be as spontaneous as possible, feeding off the energy of the audience. I just let myself be and have fun on stage.

In England, when we're at drama school, we spend a lot of time learning the craft from playwrights and stage actors, who are very well trained in the basics of acting because they need to get it right the first time - you can't have second or third takes when you're in front of a live audience, unlike in film.

Coming from sitcom television and coming from music you burn up every single second. You don't leave anything there. You burn it up and you pass out when you walk off stage, so I took that concept into acting.

I've ended up spending more time in front of a camera than on stage, but the stage is where I come from.

It's very different working on stage to film; the immediacy is there on stage.

I think 'West Side Story' is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, musicals ever put onscreen - or stage, for that matter. I, frankly, like Zeffirelli's 'Romeo and Juliet' very much, too. I grew up with that... I loved it. I loved the score; I loved the acting.

I think for acting on stage and in film, one informs the other. Obviously, they require really different kinds of discipline and really different kinds of work. It's more along the same continuum, for me.

It's really up to the acting community to be willing to be educated about what performance capture is in order to fully appreciate it as acting. It's not a type of acting, but rather the use of technology to harness an actor's performance and translate it into an ape, another animal, or an avatar of some kind.

I wanted to go to drama school, but when I got the part in 'Falling,' I got an agent, so it seemed a good idea to work. I always did a lot of singing and dancing, so I am glad it worked out that way. I would like to study stage acting at some point, though.

When I connect to my soul, project it into another #? character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film--that has always been for me the great joy of #? acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around.

I have horrible stage fright - you know how you go through the bi-polar stage fright thing? Then you go on drugs to get over the stage fright and perform, but then you're not funny at all.

You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'

As a stand up, and often in acting, there is no place for the most intense feelings. Rage, genuine sorrow, naked hope... These things don't fit on a comedy stage and if you act you'll get to express them once in a while. Music is a place for the intensely personal.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part.

I wasn't really driven to be an actor or anything, but in college I decided to study acting, much to my parents' disappointment. I attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers where Bill Esper was, and that is where I really got hooked on the art of acting, and, almost, the chemistry of acting.

I was a stage dad. When I was with Earth, Wind and Fire, I was their stage dad - the O'Jays, I was the stage dad.

I never went to stage school or anything like that. It was always plays, productions at school and things like that. The thing for me with acting was it was the only thing I could fully concentrate on. I loved playing sports. I didn't really love studying.

I went to theater school, and if I spent time with one school of thought in this whole acting game, it's the Meisner approach of improvise-based acting. This does not mean that you improvise your acting, but that you focus on the other person.

You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfillment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.

I always felt there was a chip on my shoulder at the junior stage, the amateur stage.

I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.

When you go through a tunnel - you're going on a train - you go through a tunnel, the tunnel is dark, but you're still going forward. Just remember that. But if you're not going to get up on stage for one night because you're discouraged or something, then the train is going to stop. Everytime you get up on stage, if it's a long tunnel, it's going to take a lot of times of going on stage before things get bright again. You keep going on stage, you go forward. EVERY night you go on stage.

It has been an honor to paint on stage and have my art grace the albums and stage sets of renowned musicians.

There was no one moment when I decided I would spend my life acting. I am not certain that I will. Acting has never been a consistent passion. I have done it since I was young - so I have been acting for 30 years - but intermittently. I always had other jobs, joys, and creative outlets.

That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage. I think the stage is an actor's place because actors, it belongs to you.

I absolutely love being on stage. I live and breathe the stage, and nothing makes me happier, but to perform.

I'm not trying to take anything away from film acting, because it's also really hard, and I worship the people who are great at it. But to actually have to go out on stage night after night and do it with your audience right there is so wild and scary and exciting and fun and all the things that I remember loving about it.

I earned the opportunity to stand on stage with many senior artists at YG, and naturally, I gained stage experience.

Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better!

I couldn't believe it! I mean, I'd always dreamed of acting on the screen - my previous background was all theater - but I wasn't sure if the opportunity would ever present itself. Not only was this acting for the screen, this was acting in 'The Hunger Games!' I knew that I had to give this audition my all.

You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.

It's so scary to go on stage. I used to throw up before I went on stage, every time.

I didn't want there to be a computer on stage. When I see people with computers on stage, I think, 'Are you sending e-mail?' That's so corny.

Acting is all about relating to the people on stage with you, even in plays that break the fourth wall. Clowning, for the most part, is the opposite. If somebody in the audience sneezes, I can count on it: I don't even have to look at Shiner; he'll have his handkerchief out. It's all about all of us in the room together.

It's fine to have talent, but talent is the last of it. In an acting career, as in an acting performance, you've got to have vitality. The secret of successful acting is identical with a woman's beauty secret: joy in living.

For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.

I suffer greatly from nerves. I have stage-fright badly, and it gets worse, but the stage is still my life.

I've done a lot of stage in my life, but I never had to dominate a stage for three hours.

My apartment is my stage, and my bedroom is my stage - they're just not stages you're allowed to see.

I grew up doing stage work as a child and as a teenager, so the stage is my home where I feel most comfortable.

I have an occasionally recurring stutter, but not when in character on stage in a play. Odd. James Earl Jones has the same pattern; he stutters in everyday life but not when acting. Preparation requires an actor's concentration to make the words belong to another person, which is its own sort of trance.

It's a career that's enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can't go into acting for that because it's really your own self-belief that's going to get you through.

None of the original love and feel for going on stage is gone. I'm not a true singer. I'm performer, and I need to be on stage.

I am coming to the end of acting. I have a list: another stage production, maybe one or two more movies, one more season of American Horror Story. . . and then that is it for me. Because I think that's enough. I want to go out with a bang. . . or should I say, a scare?

When I'm acting, that's all I'm doing. When I'm not acting, I'm not thinking about acting. If I'm writing, I'm just writing.