It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
Laurence OlivierRead
Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.
Interpretation
Acting is a form of art that involves creating illusions rather than portraying reality.
Laurence Olivier's quote reflects on the nature of acting, suggesting that it is not necessarily about being authentic or true to life but rather about creating a believable illusion for an audience. Just like magic, acting relies on the skill of the performer to craft an experience that captivates and engages viewers, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.
In practice
This quote can be used to inspire actors during a workshop on performance techniques.
It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money.
Work is life for me, it is the only point of life - and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor - to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.
Acting is an everlasting search for truth.
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.
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