Quotes on Acting

The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself.

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.

You should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist... . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Nothing is more powerful than an individual acting out their conscience, thus helping bring the collective conscience to life.

Whoever acquires knowledge but does not practice it is as one who ploughs but does not sow.

For me, acting was always a way to explore emotions - to dip into the well and really try to reach rock bottom down there. That was the most exciting part of it. I hadn't found anything that really allowed me to do that until I came upon acting.

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.

It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

Once I moved to Chicago and started trying to get acting jobs, I just tended to book more things that were comedically based than anything else. I never had the preconceived notion, "I will be a comedic actor." I just thought, "I'll go into acting and see what kind of work I can get."

Have a bias toward action - let's see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.

I'm the audience's representative on earth.

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.

Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s only living insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.