Top 1200 Stage Actors Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

Acting on the stage is a luxury for me. I lose money. I make movies for financial reasons and this allows me the luxury of acting on Broadway. Hollywood, unfortunately, exploits actors for their own reasons, which are usually financial. So we might as well exploit Hollywood as much as it exploits us.

My advice to actors? To successful actors, it's, 'sock it away,' and unsuccessful actors, it's just, 'Just keep at it. Don't do it unless you have to do it, and if you have to do it, keep - you've got to keep your instrument in shape.' You just got to keep on getting better. If you're not getting better, you're standing still.

I got to do the movie, and people who enjoyed 'The Birdcage' came out to see me on stage when I did 'Forum.' It introduced me to a whole new audience that wasn't familiar with my stage work.

Why is it that the producers can do anything and get away with it, and the actors are held accountable for everything? The makers often stop actors' payments, too. Everything is in their favour in the contract.

I'm certainly not your typical front-man material. Some people love being on stage and really open up, and I'm sort of the opposite of that. I don't crave the spotlight. I'm still not comfortable even talking on stage.

When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'

With stand-up you can just be yourself on stage. And ideally, you can't see the crowd most of the time - it's just lights in your face. But I still have had terrible stage fright.

I feel that the industry can be sliced into two categories - grateful actors and non-grateful actors.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

Most of my good friends are my friends from high school or childhood, and they're not actors - they have 9-to-5 jobs. But I've obviously, over time, developed friendships with actors. It's two completely different worlds.

For many years, there has been only one place where I am in touch with my emotions fearlessly, and that's the stage. Being on stage fills my soul in many ways, almost completely. It's my vice.

I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?

Somehow I feel South Indian actors are not that well known in the Hindi belt. Tamil and Telugu actors have an upper hand. But Kannada and Kerala are totally sidelined by Hindi filmgoers.

There are a lot of weenie American actors, and a lot of foreign actors are having the luck.

I don't offer advice to actors only because I've seen actors become successful through ways that would never even occur to me or that wouldn't work for me.

There are so many talented actors in Chicago, I have to go see shows when I'm there. A lot of these actors, who I've seen when I'm in Chicago in theaters, are technically amazing and never have an opportunity to showcase it on a bigger medium.

Because of the way we let the actors improvise, it feels like you're watching people react rather than actors reading lines - so I think that's always going to be something I like.

The process of finding an actor is always difficult and there's always so many variables that come into play. Also, actors sometimes carry baggage, fans associate actors with certain parts.

It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.

It's always weird when you see a movie, and there's no reason for someone to, like, jump on stage and be a singer, and then they just do that... But if it came organically, I would grab that mike and jump on stage for sure.

I know some people who are like, 'I love fitness,' and I feel like if you have to say that, you're still in the romance stage. I'm in the stage where I've been married to it for 60 years, and I don't think I'll ever get a divorce.

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.

For the two hours I climb on stage, I become the schoolboy. But as soon as it is over, I get off stage and go home and get told to wipe my feet before I come in.

I have been on stage on a few occasions where I felt I couldn't escape the interior of my - my interior thoughts. But Peter Wolf once said, what's the strangest thing you can do on stage? Think about what you're doing.

Most of my comedy writing happens through improvisation on stage; doing it in the moment. Going up with an idea and fleshing it out over time on stage and in front of people until it becomes a full bit.

My ideal setting is I walk from the streets, backstage, and straight onto the stage. Two minutes, and I am on the stage. That way, in my head I have gone from my world and then into a social setting with my friends.

You know, some actors, all of their potential is in their youth, and when that passes, their qualities of as an actor pass. But he - Alan [Rickman] was the opposite, and their are other actors who are like that, who, really, their potential is in maturity.

I had two ambitions: One was to be in The Actors Studio, and the other was to walk into a bar where actors hung out, and everyone would know that I was a professional actor and I would be accepted.

I think the actors in 'Greystoke' were amazing. They had a really good performance coach called Peter Elliott who's, of his time, one of the greatest simian performance coaches for actors.

I don't have a problem with big name actors coming into animation. It actually has been done for years and we are after all actors, it is just a different medium that requires a different technique.

There are actors who make no decisions about how to play something until they're in the moment, looking into their scene partner's eyes. So they're completely available for whatever happens. And those are actors who tend to avoid getting into patterns.

The one immutable reality of film is, no matter how wonderful the actors and the performances are, every year the actors age and grow older - Sophie Turner's Jean Grey was wonderful!

Touring and performing is the best part of my job. I love it. I guess I like pop and rock. Really getting into a powerful stage performane, running around like crazy on the stage.

It's my goal to help actors achieve their best work, and I think I speak the same language as actors, so I understand how they do it, and I just love being able to create the playground in which they build their beautiful sandcastle.

I want to aspire to something like what Denzel Washington does, which is try to find scripts written for white actors - or Jodie Foster, who reads scripts for male actors.

After working for years in Hollywood where the actors have taken over, it was a real relief to get down there and not only have some children, but also have some actors that had no attitude.

Trust your actors. That's why I work with the same actors time and time again. I encourage them to change the dialogue to achieve one thing: keep the characters honest.

I use Jimmy Galanos gowns for real special occasions and things - television, special occasions where I know I'm being filmed. But I never really wear his gowns on stage. My stage gowns are more costumey. There's different levels of things that I wear.I would never wear my stage gowns to a party.

There are a lot of directors out there that don't like to deal with actors, I think. Many of them have said something like, in the future they will actually manipulate the actors on their computers. But don't believe all this.

Actors are different. Some actors play themselves very successfully, but I come from the theater. Having done Shakespeare, we sometimes did three or four characters in the same play.

I never make suggestions. I really don't. I know a lot of actors who get a part and then they dissect it and they want to change it and they want to add stuff. I'm always amazed and so impressed by actors who do that.

You don't often get a chance to record with the other actors who are playing the characters, mainly due to the fact that you don't have to, the actors' schedules are all over the place, and it's difficult to get everyone in the same room.

When I get on stage, Beyonce is my alter ego. The way that she's Beyonce in real life and then Sasha Fierce on stage, I'm Normani in real life, and then I pretend to be Beyonce on stage. I just love that she's constantly reinventing herself but stays true to who she is as a person - and she wears so many hats in her life.

Seed stage is an investment area that is really important for early stage startups. It feels like there is a need for trusted, experienced people to work with and to guide startups at this level.

Standing center stage in the six foot circle of wood cut from the stage of the Ryman is something I never take for granted. The history and legacy of that circle is awe-inspiring.

I won the speech competition in class, and I always say this was my first 'spoken word performance.' It was the first time I got on stage and recited something. I fell in love with the stage at the age of 12.

Audiences want Burt, John Wayne and others to go on doing the same thing forever. It's critics and the actors themselves who want actors to try different things.

The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.

I like young actors because they're so unspoiled, not like some of those actors who are about half an hour into their fifteen minutes of fame by the time they get to me.

Often you find actors have big hearts; they're quite emotional people. Talking to actors who date other actors, and talking to people who deal with other actors, they often get emotionally caught up in lots of different things. They often wear their hearts on their sleeves. They feel things quite a lot - often to the nth degree, which I can imagine could make it quite difficult to date some of us. I think it's about having an emotional availability that you can kind of draw on. But I'm also searching for that. I'll be searching for the answer to that question for the rest of my life.

There are so many young talented actors today whose work I respect and admire - Ryan Gosling is probably primary among them. I take inspiration from so many amazing actors.

The less people that are on the stage, there's more drama. You start living the music with each individual. When you see a band with ten people on stage, just a huge ensemble, you don't know who's doing what.

I know there are different kinds of actors, but I tend to have less effective relationships with actors who have a very private process - who really need to do lots of internal work, so that I become merely a witness until they're ready to share.

I moved on to the University of California, Berkley, coordinating interpreters for Deaf students at the university. The first year I was at Berkley, we brought in artists, performers, actors, and poets to create a Deaf arts festival. I did a lot of the interpreting for the stage performers. By the second year, I realized that I really liked producing arts festivals that had to do something with signing.

I don't think anyone's particularly conscious of thinking suits are the thing, but when you see a comedian on stage in jeans and a t-shirt it doesn't matter how good they are - it always looks like amateur hour when they walk onto the stage.

My advice to actors? To successful actors, it's, "sock it away," and unsuccessful actors, it's just, "Just keep at it. Don't do it unless you have to do it and if you have to do it, keep you've got to keep your instrument in shape. You just got to keep on getting better. If you're not getting better, you're standing still.

I was full of energy, and I had a lot of bottled up rage that would come out in my stage performances. It was therapy sessions for someone who couldn't afford to go to therapy, a way to release my frustration, my inhibition. When I was little, growing up in an abusive household, I felt like I didn't have a voice. Suddenly I was on stage and people were watching me and listening to me, so even if I was singing about something that didn't have to do with abuse, when I was on stage I could express all of the anger, the rage.

Listen to the stage manager and get on stage when they tell you to. No one has time for the rock star bullshit. None of the techs backstage care if you're David Bowie or the milkman. When you act like a jerk, they are completely unimpressed with the infantile display that you might think comes with your dubious status. They were there hours before you building the stage, and they will be there hours after you leave tearing it down. They should get your salary, and you should get theirs.

There are no bad actors. There are only bad directors who cannot make their actors act.