Quotes About Acting

“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― W.B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age

“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.”
― Al Pacino

“I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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

“I wish to Heaven I was married," she said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing. "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I'm tired of acting like I don't eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I'm tired of saying, 'How wonderful you are!' to fool men who haven't got one-half the sense I've got, and I'm tired of pretending I don't know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they're doing it... I can't eat another bite.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

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

Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously.”
― Carrie Fisher, Postcards from the Edge

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

“There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“I know very little about acting. I’m just an incredibly gifted faker.”
― Robert Downey Jr.

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

“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

“What's important about an actor is his acting, not his life.”
― Vincent Price

“In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel”
― Constantin Stanislavski, Creating a Role

“I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.”
― Vivien Leigh

“I won't do this movie because I don't believe the love story," she told Selznick. "The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can't fall in love so deeply.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.”
― Katharine Hepburn

“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

“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 and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made. ”
― George Burns

“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

“Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?”
― Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

“At once, it’s clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don’t have the arrogance. Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious By the end of the session, I am no one at all.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“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

“I have only one rule in acting--trust the director, and give him heart and soul.”
― Ava Gardner

“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

“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

“It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship