Quotes on Actors

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer...but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.

There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.

Being a movie star, and this applies to all of them, means being looked at from every possible direction. You are never left at peace, you're just fair game.

The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.

The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God.

I have only one rule in acting - trust the director and give him heart and soul.

If you're an actor and you don't get cast in stuff a lot, then put together a show or hold play-reading nights at your apartment. Make your own opportunities.

When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.

Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. Like you don't dare get a cold. How dare you get a cold! I mean, the executives can get colds and stay home forever and phone it in, but how dare you, the actor, get a cold or a virus. You know, no one feels worse than the one who's sick. I sometimes wish, gee, I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection.

Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.

Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

You need some insecurity if you're an actor. It keeps the pot boiling. I haven't yet started to think about retiring. I was shocked when I heard about Paul Newman retiring at age 82. Most actors just fade away like old soldiers.

When you first start out as an actor, you're just looking for a good part. As time goes on, if you're being held responsible for the movies themselves, you're looking for a good script all around.

What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.

There's a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven't. You just do the best you can.

The Welsh are all actors. It's only the bad ones who become professional.

To direct actors is difficult. To direct actors in another language is more difficult, but directing non-actors in another language is one of the craziest things that I have done and one of the most rewarding experiences I have had.