"Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."

Carrie Fisher "I did masses of opiates religiously."
— Carrie Fisher (Postcards from the Edge)

"I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, "Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman." "
— David Bowie

"Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there."
— Meryl Streep

"What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life."
— Vincent Price

"Once in a while I experience an emotion onstage that is so gut-wrenching, so heart-stopping, that I could weep with gratitude and joy. The feeling catches and magnifies so rapidly that it threatens to engulf me."
— Julie Andrews Edwards (Home: A Memoir of My Early Years)

"To act, you must know pain. You must know what it means to be in love, what it means to be rejected."
— Preity Zinta

"I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist. "
— Susan Sarandon

"We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday’s films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls. "
— Daphne du Maurier (The "Rebecca" Notebook: And Other Memories)

"I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience."
— Shelley Winters

"When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise."
— Lauren Bacall

"There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!""
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Death is just the last scene of the last act."
— Joyce Carol Oates (Blonde)

"Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion. "
— Kate Reid

"I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives."
— François Truffaut

"In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel"
— Constantin Stanislavski (Creating a Role)

"Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made. "
— George Burns

"MIKADO:
I’m really very sorry for you all, but it’s an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.
The Mikado, Act II"
— W.S. Gilbert

"Fresh from a costume fitting, where I had been posing in front of the mirror assuming what I thought was a strong position - arms folded, butch-looking...you know - I met with the woman in charge of Holloway police station. She gave me the most invaluable advice: never let them see you cry, and never cross your arms. When I asked why, she said 'because it is a defensive action and therefore weak.'"
— Helen Mirren

"The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was contorted with anguish, one could see the perspiration dampening his hair. His eyes dilated, his muscles became cramped, his fingers struggled to retain their flexibility. He made one feel the parched and burning throat, the pains, the fever, the fire in the guts. He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own crucifixion.
At first people gasped. And then they began to laugh. Everyone was laughing! They hissed. Then, one by one, they began to leave, noisily, talking, protesting. They banged the door as they left. The only ones who did not move were Allendy, his wife, the Lalous, Marguerite. More protestations. More jeering. But Artaud went on, until the last gasp. And stayed on the floor. Then when the hall had emptied of all but his small group of friends, he walked straight up to me and kissed my hand. He asked me to go to the cafe with him. "
— Anaïs Nin

"I think I tend to be drawn to, a lot of the stories have really strong family elements. I'm really drawn to that element of it. I think that's one of the biggest hooks of the show for me, is like, what do these powers do to the relationships in everybody's lives? I really feel like the dynamic in the Bennett family is really compelling and really complicated."
— Zachary Quinto