Acting

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Quotes on Acting.

Arranged alphabetically by author.

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[edit] Sourced

  • For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
    • Ethel Barrymore quoted in George Jean Nathan's The Theatre in the fifties
  • It's not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.
  • For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
  • An actor's a guy, who if you ain't talking about him, ain't listening.
  • Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity.
    • Marlon Brando, Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion
  • Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long.
  • If a studio offered to pay me as much to sweep the floor as it did to act, I'd sweep the floor. There isn't anything that pays you as well as acting while you decide what the hell you're going to do with yourself. Who cares about the applause? Do I need applause to feel good about myself?
  • The close-up says everything, it's then that an actor's learned, rehearsed behavior becomes most obvious to an audience and chips away, unconsciously, at its experience of reality. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.
  • What they teach in these acting schools is incredible, hair-raising crap. The Actors Studio in America is supposed to be the worst. There the students learn how to be natural - that is, they flop around, pick their noses, scratch their balls. This bullshit is known as "method acting." How can you "teach" someone to be an actor? How can you teach someone how and what to feel and how to express it? How can someone teach me how to laugh or cry? How to be glad and how to be sad? What pain is, or despair or happiness? What poverty and hunger are? What hate and love are? What desire is, and fulfillment? No, I don't want to waste my time with these arrogant morons.
    • Klaus Kinski, in Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 59
  • People call me an "actor". What's that? In any case, it has nothing to do with the shit that people have always blabbered about it. It's neither a vocation nor a profession - although it's how I earn my living. But then so does the two-headed freak at the carnival. It's something you have to try and live with - until you learn how to free yourself. It has nothing to do with nonesense like "talent," and it's nothing to be conceited or proud of.
    • Klaus Kinski, in Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996), p. 310
  • By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.
  • Acting is therefore the lowest of the arts, if it is an art at all.
  • In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.
    • Ralph Richardson, The Observer Magazine, 'Tynan on Richardson', (18 Dec 1977).
  • The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
  • An actor can practice anywhere any time with anybody, and most of them do.

[edit] Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 4-6.
  • Farce follow'd Comedy, and reach'd her prime,
    In ever-laughing Foote's fantastic time;
    Mad wag! who pardon'd none, nor spared the best,
    And turn'd some very serious things to jest.
    Nor church nor state escaped his public sneers,
    Arms nor the gown, priests, lawyers, volunteers;
    "Alas, poor Yorick!" now forever mute!
    Whoever loves a laugh must sigh for Foote.
    We smile, perforce, when histrionic scenes
    Ape the swoln dialogue of kings and queens,
    When "Chrononhotonthologos must die,"
    And Arthur struts in mimic majesty.
  • As good as a play.
    • Saying ascribed to Charles II, while listening to a debate on Lord Ross's Divorce Bill.
  • But as for all the rest,
    There's hardly one (I may say none) who stands the Artist's test.
    The Artist is a rare, rare breed. There were but two, forsooth,
    In all me time (the stage's prime!) and The Other One was Booth.
  • I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.
  • See, how these rascals use me! They will not let my play run; and yet they steal my thunder.
    • John Dennis, see Biographia Britannica, Volume V, p. 103.
  • Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks:
    Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks.
    The founder's you: the table is this place:
    The carvers we: the prologue is the grace.
    Each act, a course, each scene, a different dish,
    Though we're in Lent. I doubt you're still for flesh.
    Satire's the sauce, high-season'd, sharp and rough.
    Kind masks and beaux, I hope you're pepper-proof?
    Wit is the wine; but 'tis so scarce the true
    Poets, like vintners, balderdash and brew.
    Your surly scenes, where rant and bloodshed join.
    Are butcher's meat, a battle's sirloin:
    Your scenes of love, so flowing, soft and chaste,
    Are water-gruel without salt or taste.
  • Prologues precede the piece in mournful verse,
    As undertakers walk before the hearse.
  • Prologues like compliments are loss of time;
    'Tis penning bows and making legs in rhyme.
  • On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting,'Twas only that when he was off, he was acting.
  • Everybody has his own theatre, in which he is manager, actor, prompter, playwright, sceneshifter, boxkeeper, doorkeeper, all in one, and audience into the bargain.
  • It's very hard! Oh, Dick, my boy,
    It's very hard one can't enjoy
    A little private spouting;
    But sure as Lear or Hamlet lives,
    Up comes our master, Bounce! and gives
    The tragic Muse a routing.
  • And Tragedy should blush as much to stoop
    To the low mimic follies of a farce,
    As a grave matron would to dance with girls.
    • Horace, Of the Art of Poetry, line 272. Wentworth Dillon's translation.
  • The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give.
    For we that live to please, must please to live.
    • Samuel Johnson, Prologue. Spoken by Mr. Garrick on Opening Drury Lane Theatre. (1747) line 53.
  • Who teach the mind its proper face to scan,
    And hold the faithful mirror up to man.
  • A long, exact, and serious comedy;
    In every scene some moral let it teach,
    And, if it can, at once both please and preach.
    • Alexander Pope, Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, line 22.
  • This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew.
    • Attributed to Alexander Pope when Macklin was performing the character of Shylock, Feb. 14, 1741.
  • There still remains to mortify a wit
    The many-headed monster of the pit.
  • To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
    To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
    To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
    Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold—
    For this the tragic Muse first trod the stage.
  • Your scene precariously subsists too long,
    On French translation and Italian song.
    Dare to have sense yourselves; assert the stage;
    Be justly warm'd with your own native rage.
  • Tom Goodwin was an actor-man,
    Old Drury's pride and boast,
    In all the light and spritely parts,
    Especially the ghost.
  • The play bill which is said to have announced the tragedy of Hamlet, the character of the Prince of Denmark being left out.
  • Like a dull actor now,
    I have forgot my part, and I am out,
    Even to a full disgrace.
  • Good, my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
  • Is it not monstrous that this player here,
    But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
    Could force his soul so to his own conceit
    That from her working all his visage wann'd.
  • What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
    That he should weep for her? What would he do.
    Had he the motive and the cue for passion
    That I have? He would drown the stage with tears.
  • I have heard
    That guilty creatures sitting at a play,
    Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
    Been struck so to the soul that presently
    They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
    For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak.
    With most miraculous organ.
  • The play's the thing
    Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
  • Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
  • Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature.
  • O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
  • A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
    Which is as brief as I have known a play;
    But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
    Which makes it tedious.
  • As in a theatre, the eyes of men,
    After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage,
    Are idly bent on him that enters next,
    Thinking his prattle to be tedious.
  • I can counterfeit the deep tragedian;
    Speak and look back, and pry on every side,
    Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
    Intending deep suspicion.
  • And, like a strutting player, whose conceit
    Lies in his hamstring, and doth think it rich
    To hear the wooden dialogue and sound
    'Twixt his stretch'd footing and the scaffoldage.
  • (The) play of limbs succeeds the play of wit.
  • Lo, where the Stage, the poor, degraded Stage,
    Holds its warped mirror to a gaping age!
  • The play is done; the curtain drops,
    Slow falling to the prompter's bell:
    A moment yet the actor stops,
    And looks around, to say farewell.
    It is an irksome word and task:
    And, when he's laughed and said his say,
    He shows, as he removes the mask,
    A face that's anything but gay.
  • In other things the knowing artist may
    Judge better than the people; but a play,
    (Made for delight, and for no other use)
    If you approve it not, has no excuse.

[edit] Unsourced

  • To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
  • The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.
  • You can sit there and have a universal experience, of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that its the audience, really, that is doing the acting.
  • If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
  • An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.
  • If you're successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.
  • When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.
  • Pray to God and say the lines.
    • Bette Davis, 'advice to the actress Celeste Holm. Attrib.
  • I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
  • Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
  • [T]he question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.
  • Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' We're given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there's a group of people all ready to make a film and it's a marvelous life.
  • It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.
  • If there wasn't something called acting they would probably hospitalize people like me. The giddiness and the joy of life is the moving and grooving, the exploration.
  • You're an actor, are you? Well, all that means is: you are irresponsible, irrational, romantic, and incapable of handling an adult emotion or a universal concept without first reducing it to something personal, material, sensational — and probably sexual!
  • All actors are cattle. Actually, all actors are not cattle, but should be treated as such.
  • When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, But what's my motivation?, I say, 'Your salary.'
  • Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, actors!
  • Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people -- with agents.
  • An actor onstage can no more act upon the order 'Be happy' than she can upon the order 'Do not think of a hippopotamus.'
  • We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses.
  • Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.
  • An actress must never lose her ego — without it she has no talent.
  • Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
  • Every now and then, when you're onstage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It's a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.

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