Martin Landau

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

I run the Actor's Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach - many of whom are acting teachers - is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.

I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren't easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That's what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.

As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.

I've spent a lot of time playing roles that didn't really challenge me. I suppose every actor feels that way.

When someone is there for you, has your back, that's somebody to pay attention to because that's a friend.

I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.

I was being groomed to be the theatrical caricaturist. And I know if I got that job, I'd never quit. So I quit. I knew I wanted to go into the theater... I wanted to act.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.