Selected acting quotes

1. I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

2. To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

3. A lot of girls ask for advice on how to get into acting, and I'm kind of the worst person to ask, because it just kind of fell in my lap... I was just in the right place at the right time.

4. Acting is not pretending or lying. It's finding a side of yourself that's the character and ignoring your other sides. And there's a side of me that wonders what's wrong with being completely honest.

5. My entire film career's been dependent on my ability to look unattractive.

6. I don't think of myself as a character actress - that's become a phrase which means you've had it.

7. People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

8. Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies.

9. Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

10. You just wait. I'm going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.

11. I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

12. It was only when I realized how actors have the power to move people that I decided to pursue acting as a career.

13. God felt sorry for actors, so he gave them a place in the sun and a lot of money. All they had to sacrifice was their talent.

14. I've always believed that acting is instinct to start with; you either have it or you don't.

15. My old drama coach used to say, 'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing.

16. I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.

17. If you're an actor, a real actor, you've got to be on the stage. But you mustn't go on the stage unless it's absolutely the only thing you can do.

18. Actresses are such very dull people off the stage. We are only delightful and brilliant when we are doing what we are told to do. Off stage we are awful chumps.

19. He played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the ace.

20. [Malipiero's advice to Casanova.] If you wish your audience to cry, you must shed tears yourself, but if you wish to make them laugh you must contrive to look as serious as a judge.

21. As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.

22. It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

23. I'm in the business of helping stories get told, and I love this story. People don't say to me, When you were in Proof, were you afraid to play a mathematician? Or, Was it scary to play a Marine in Jarhead? Why is that?

24. I like drama. I love being in a drama where I get to be the funny guy. That's what I really love the most.

25. Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.

26. I started when I was three years old, doing commercials and Modeling in New York, I liked it so much that I kept doing it.

27. I want to play an action hero. I'm ready for roles that totally aren't me.

28. In movies, I hope women aren't always portrayed as sex symbols. People like Drew Barrymore are paving the way for girls my age. Hopefully I can pave the way for young actresses, too.

29. I wish I'd never been an actor. I'd rather have been a streetwalker, selling my body, than selling my tears and my laughter, my grief and my joy.

30. Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept.

31. Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin.

32. Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.

33. The close-up says everything, it's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.

34. Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

35. An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

36. If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you're unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.

37. To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

38. Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

39. I was terrorized by the emotional requirements of being an actor. Acting is like letting your pants down; you're exposed.

40. I wasn't driven to acting by any inner compulsion. I was running away from the sporting goods business.

41. My public image isn't much about how I determine roles. I've always felt this way as a director that almost anyone can give a good or representative performance when you're unknown. It's just easier.

42. The question of identity to me, whether it's sexual or whatever it is, is what makes this movie so powerful. That's why I did it. My own struggle with who I am, and who I am to other people, and what masks I put on, is all hopefully interlaced in this character, and it's just kind of put in a different context.

43. Occasionally, I'd pick up the lifeguard buoy and run down the beach Baywatch-style, like something was actually happening.

44. If you can do a part and not have the acting show.

45. He made the characters a lot more three-dimensional. It's still a 'B' movie and it's still kinda campy. Now it's these really well-developed characters, really three-dimensional.

46. It's always the same thing that drives me -- a type of character or personality that I've never done before, or that allows me to try out some new acting technique. So I'm always experimenting and looking for that interesting hook.

47. One of the hardest things about playing a soldier is kinda acknowledging that I've never done, and might never do anything that brave.

48. The Lookout was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Partially because both Brick and Mysterious Skin were four to five week shoots, and The Lookout was nine or ten. So there's the marathon aspect, as well as the fact that Chris Pratt is having a harder go of it than either of the other two characters ever did. You know, waking up in the morning is difficult for him. Putting a sentence together is difficult for him. Getting dressed properly, driving a car, all these things. He can do them fine, but it's just much harder than it is for a normal person, so I had to try to make it hard for myself somehow. So it was challenging.

49. The actors can make up their dialogue. I'm bushed, and they're all funny, and the hell with it. Maybe I'll give them a premise to work off of, like 'You're all in trouble' or 'Wash has a thing'. They could maybe light it too.

50. 'I've worked with a lot of generous actors, but Jude is at the top of the list ...' - Philip Seymour Hoffman (Premiere magazine, June 2001)

51. 'He and Ethan Hawke are my favorite guys I've ever worked with.' - Gwyneth Paltrow ( Vanity Fair, October 2004)

52. 'Jude's uniqueness is that he has the talent of a character actor and the looks of a leading man.' - John Avnet (People magazine, November 24, 2004)

53. 'Jude Law is one of the most handsome men on the planet. He is a character actor struggling to get out of a beautiful body.' - Anthony Minghella [6]

54. 'The best actors always retain an air of mystery. The boring actors are the ones who give 100 per cent. One will never get to know the real Jude Law.' - Po-Chih Leong [7]

55. 'I have no problem with nudity. My friend Ewan and I are starkers in most of our films.'

56. 'Bosie [from the movie Wilde] was the first part I was ever offered, which I suppose is sort of an insult because he's just the nastiest bastard!'

57. 'Well, I had to do a nude scene [in the play Indiscretions], and you're on stage naked but you get over it, you do whatever you have to do. But the first night, my character is just getting out of the bath, and the rest of the crew had poured in freezing cold water.'

58. 'It's not ideal for me that they come out all one after the other in four or five months. I did them all because I found them very different different kinds of films, different kinds of parts. And I hope people recognize the variety rather than the onslaught'. - on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I Heart Huckabees, Alfie, Closer and The Aviator - within 6 months of each other. He actually did them in the last two years.

59. Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art. (p. 208)

60. It was horrible, I hated it. Brad and Tom were like my big brothers on the set, so it was like kissing your big brother - totally gross.

61. I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk...

62. My great ambition is to have people comment on my fine dramatic performances.

63. I remember her on the screen, huge as a colossus doll, mincing and whispering and simply hoping her way into total vulnerability.

64. Kazan is a performer's director, the best director I ever worked with... Most actors don't get any help from directors. Emotional help, if you're playing an emotional part. Kazan is the only one I know who really gives you help.

65. Agents made me a geek who gets $100,000 per chicken head.

66. You can sit there and have a universal experience, of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that its the audience, really, that is doing the acting.

67. Simply put, in film acting, there is before Brando, and there is after Brando. And they are like different worlds.

68. When the curtain came down at the Ethel Barrymore theater on Dec. 3, 1947, our standards for performance, our expectations of what an actor should offer us in the way of psychological truth and behavioral honesty, were forever changed.

69. I always wanted to have Mike Mazurki play Hammer... too bad he couldn't act.

70. I haven't been like, 'Is there a sword in that movie? All right, I'll do it!'

71. I'd love to be a sculptor. I studied photography, sculpture and theatre for my A-levels and at that age I was torn as I got better results for the others than for theatre studies. But ultimately acting was what I always wanted to do. It was my calling in life.

72. When you're trying to find that line between are you doing comedy, are you doing drama, what are you doing, Martin, for me, anchors it very often, because he approaches it from such just a pure acting standpoint.

73. But you can't emphasize 'beef', that's like his wanting me to emphasize 'in' before 'July'! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!

74. The Third Man (the Harry Lime section contains Welles's famous ad lib about war)

75. We've all seen 'Jewing it up' performances. They are about as miserable to watch as as 'camping it up' performances when representing gays.

76. Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experiences.

77. He makes it look so easy, and he looks so wonderful, that everybody assumes he isn't acting.

78. He has a good character, and not many people do. I think he would rather not do anything wrong, whether on a moral or an artistic level. He is what you would call a man of conscience - not necessarily of judgment, but of conscience. I don't know any actors like that.

79. 'Though acting came first, I love to sing,'

80. I would just look at Harrison; he would do stuff and I would not mimic it, but interpret it younger. Mimicking is a terrible mistake that many people make when they play someone younger, or with an age difference. Mimicking doesn't interpret true because you can't just edit it around.

81. (As a Shakespearean Narrator) Mind not my words - Let the PLAY be the thing. I'll get back forth and touch myself, anon.

82. Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer.

83. I read all the movie reviews, especially those of Ebert, a graceful and witty prose stylist with profound erudition, whose reviews are worth reading just for themselves, whether or not I have any intention of viewing the movie ... Ebert, the smart and handsome one, gave thumbs up to my first movie [Garfield: The Movie], but [Richard] Roeper, the other one, gave thumbs down and was particularly unkind. He went on forever attacking Ebert for liking Garfield. This from a man with enough taste to praise Duma. How very disappointing. One of Roeper's complaints was that I was animated and all of the other characters in the movie were 'real.' Do you have any idea how a statement like that hurts an actor who has worked all of his life as a media cat? Yes, Richard Roeper, I was animated. Read my lips: I am a character in a comic strip.

84. What Charlize Theron achieves in Patty Jenkins' 'Monster' isn't a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders. She does not excuse the murders. She simply asks that we witness the woman's final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended.

85. My daughter used to think I was Aamir Khan. She could not recognise me on screen. So much so that every time I came on screen she used to call out, `Aamir Khan',' - Shahrukh (with a big grin)

86. I never wanted to be an actor, I wanted to be a drunk. Now I'm neither, but nobody can tell the difference.

87. It's a really smart, faithful adaptation of the book. The book is such a tight page-turner. The character I play is an extreme guy. He's a killer. He wants to be Jesse James. He grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and wants to be that. Then he meets Mickey Rourke's character, who's named The Black Bird and he wants to partner up with him and be a criminal and kill people. He's a psychotic and very bad guy:

88. 'Jude Law is one of the finest actors of our time ...' - Sean Penn

89. ... and Jude Law is so wonderful as Gigolo Joe. ... Ian Watson [5]

90. 'I told Anthony that if I play Dickie Greenleaf, I want to eat in the best restaurants and drink the best wines every night because he would'. - on his role in The Talented Mr. Ripley

91. 'Matt [Damon] broke my rib! But I think I strained his neck, we got a little bit carried away'. - about his injury during Dickie's death scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley

92. Thanks! Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted this! You don't know...my brother sitting there, he says 'Thank God we don't have to listen to anymore... you can do it now!' My mom's home, everyone's watching... I have to thank the people at Paramount; I have to thank Jerry Zucker for taking the time he took before he decided to use me because he was sure it was for me... I have to thank Patrick Swazye... he was a stand up guy and went to them and said 'I wanna do it with her'... I wanna thank Demi... I wanna thank everybody who makes movies... I come from New York; as a kid, I lived in the projects and you're the people I watched...you're the people that made me wanna be an actor... I'm so proud to be here, I'm proud to be an actor and I'm gonna keep on acting, and thank you so much!

93. I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

94. I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, 'Aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?' Tracy replied, 'What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?' You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks.

95. A lot of what acting is, is paying attention.

96. I think I'm a singer first. I became a singer first. I was always sort of acting, but in order to sing more I got into acting because there were musicals and different performances and stuff. But then I fell in love with the craft of acting altogether.

97. You're so exposed in acting--it's so dangerous, it's so sexy.

98. I never said actors were cattle. All I said is that actors should be treated as cattle.

99. When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?' I say, 'Your salary.'

100. There are always good parts. They may not pay what you want, and they may not have as many days' work as you want, they may not have the billing that you want, they may not have a lot of things, but-the content of the role itself-I find there are many roles.