Acting quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside acting — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I'm just looking for things to steal [on working with great actors]. It's like going back to acting school. When you're around people that do it well and you get your head out of your ass, you can really learn something."
"There's a oneness to showing yourself to an audience. They feel that. It's healthy. That's what acting is all about."
"The physical stamina [in Revolution]. I was just shocked by it. I didn't think I had it in me ever, and I wasn't terribly young when I did it. I was in my early forties. That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality."
"When someone's acting for a scene, they can fool the camera. But in everyday life, unless you're watching and censoring yourself every minute, or spending all your time in the company of ladies, what you feel is bound to show in your eyes."
"Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had."
"I've done quite a few adverts. I've also done some presenting and acting work in Spain. I did a lot of Spanish education videos for people wanting to learn English."
"I know if I wasn't making music and acting, I would be involved in the performing arts world in some way. I would be either writing and making music for other artists or producing movies."
"I knew that I needed to do something that I desperately loved. There was a period where I did question if it was acting because I knew that I would be making things hard on myself. I knew that there was going to be a little bit of a hullabaloo because of my dad being who he is and all that."
"In his apology, Arnold Schwarzenegger said he was sorry to the women that he groped, and he admitted that he had acted badly. Not only that, Arnold then apologized for acting badly in all of his movies."
"It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being."
"Acting is an animal thing, not an intellectual thing."
"Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher."
"Whenever I think of the high salaries we are paid as film actors, I think it is for the travel, the time away, and any trouble you get into through being well known. It's not for the acting, that's for sure."
"My first movie, I got nominated for a Canadian Oscar-for Meatballs. For MEATBALLS. And who am I up against? George C. Scott. So he wins the award and I stand up and go, 'That's it-let's get the hell outta here.'"
"I've never worked with an acting coach, but my parents had acting classes and I grew up around them my whole life just because I didn't have a babysitter."
"I think for a lot of people, acting becomes a lifestyle, especially when you're living in Los Angeles."
"I actually think that craft service was the reason I got into acting: the free food. I literally remember on my first job being like, "Yes! I get to have craft service every day!""
"I'm wearing three hats; I'm acting, producing, and directing. I was very involved in developing the script, too. But to me, that is very liberating. To me, the lower the budget, the more I want to be involved. I want to be more in control of my own destiny when there isn't much money involved, because you don't have the experts who can control your destiny."
"You can't show up on set and expect it all to come together. You have to have a plan, much like how the director can't just show up and go, well, where should I put the camera? That is gonna determine how it is lit, you should have already been in the room looking at it earlier, pre-lit the room, you know there is a lot of prep that goes into it, so it is the same thing with acting. You can't just show up."
"What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field."
