Quotes on Acting

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.

Understand and be confident that each of us can make a difference by caring and acting in small as well as big ways.

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

Because the relationship between self and world is reciprocal, it is not a matter of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us. No need to wait. As we care enough to take risks, we loosen the grip of ego and begin to come home to our true nature.

You're creating a different world and the actor's job is to be able to convince the audience to enter into that world, whether it be actually something that you recognize from your own life or not.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.

I find that kid actors are great reminders of the simplicity of acting. As you get older, you can sometimes complicate things a little more. You can become too aware of, 'Okay, this is the scene emotionally. This is where we need to be. We've got the climax coming up.' You can start to analyze it too much.

It is the habit of every aggressor nation to claim that it is acting on the defensive.

It's tough, acting. You have to walk two lines of a tightrope. There's the all-consuming fear of failure: I'm about to fall flat on my face. There's that and there's also confidence - you have to be confident in order to try things - and they fight each other all the time.

I think I have always tried to do the smaller films. I like to jump around and there is something really nice for acting in a smaller film... But I think now, Hollywood's movies certainly involve a younger generation for the most part and so... I love going back and forth.

Acting, I found, was the biggest charge I ever had. What other artist has it so good? Approval so quick?

I'm in the acting business. That's the ego business.

Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.

Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.

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

One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.