Quotes on Acting

Acting is all about relating to the people on stage with you, even in plays that break the fourth wall. Clowning, for the most part, is the opposite. If somebody in the audience sneezes, I can count on it: I don't even have to look at Shiner; he'll have his handkerchief out. It's all about all of us in the room together.

The enemies of acting are mood and attitude and other general homogenized disruptive entities. Whereas acting is about action - doing - and unless you can figure out a way to craft in an imaginative reality to which you don't submit, you're going to be out of control. You'll flip out. The job is to be surprised.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

Acting is just being a man. Being human. Not forcing it.

Acting is make-believe. I never believe I'm the character; I want you to believe.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

The Play's the Thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

Whether it's repro rights, violence against women, or just plain old vanilla sexism, most issues affecting women have one thing in common - they exist to keep women 'in their place.' To make sure that we're acting 'appropriately,' whatever that means.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.

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

You don't know when you're being watched. That's one of the weird things about celebrity. It's my least favorite part of acting, celebrity.

Law is downstream from culture. By the time you make a law about something, you're reacting, not acting. I'd rather shape the culture.

Look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones the direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them. Does anyone here have a problem with that?

Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.

I started being interested in acting when I heard the voices of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. Ive had the great privilege of working with Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Anthony Hopkins. These are people who inspire the work that I do.

Am I proud of being straight? No. You know why? Because if I start acting proud, that's going to make me seem kind of gay.