Quotes on Acting

Acting, to me, is about the incredible adventure of examining the landscape of human heart and soul. That's basically what we do.

You know, be an actor because you love to act. Don't be an actor because you think you're going to get famous, because that's luck.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

If I spent all my time criticising myself, I wouldn't be able to function. There are actors who theorise till the cows come home. I haven't the patience for them. It's maybe shallow, but that's why I'll never be part of the acting set.

I began by acting like the person I wanted to be, and eventually I became that person.

Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.

It's no use to go and take courses in playwriting any more than it's much use taking courses in acting. Better play to a bad matinée in Hull, it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction.

Though I still turn up my coat-collar in a lonely way and am always looking at myself in mirrors, they’re only habits and give no clue at all to my character, whatever that is. The most difficult performance in the world is acting naturally isn’t it? Everything else is artful.

An acting career usually has about a shelf life of ten years before people get sick of seeing you. It's a good thing to have a job to fall back on and I really do enjoy directing.

Any system which says, This is a rotten world, wait for the next, give up, do nothing, succumb--that may be the basic Lie and if we participate in believing it and acting (or rather not acting) on it we involve ourselves in the Lie and suffer dreadfully... which only reinforces that particular Lie.

I think acting is a mixture of instinct, imagination and inventiveness. All you can learn as an actor is basic technique.

No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.