Quotes on Acting

An acting teacher once told me, 'Greet everything with yes... Even if you abandon one idea for another one, saying yes allows you to move forward.'

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

No one should ever know where conduct ends and acting begins. Conduct unbecoming. That's what acting is.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.

I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

I find that’s one of the great things about acting-you have the opportunity to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Each character faces a dilemma in her life, and as an actor you’re able to step into that character’s skin, look through her eyes. You leave transformed, a different person, because once you live a little bit of someone’s life, it changes you.

It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

People think that if you look fairly reasonable, you can't possibly act, and as I only care about acting, I think beauty can be a great handicap.

For perpetrators, when they apologize and experience remorse, it gives them a chance to reclaim their own humanity. Some rise to the moral challenge. Others of course don't care, and they continue acting with contempt.

I learnt that fame is an illusion and everything about it is just a joke. I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all.

I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.

I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I'm not supernatural. I've done nothing extremely special to deserve the position. It happens every couple of years, and it's happened to hundreds of people before me.

The prodigious waste of human life occasioned by this perpetual struggle for room and food, was more than supplied by the mighty power of population, acting, in some degree, unshackled, from the constant habit of emigration.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.