Acting quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside acting — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs."
"Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly."
"Acting is not about competing. Acting is about cooperating. Acting is about collaboration. It's about your utility, your usefulness, your capacity to add to the work that has already been done and will be done. You're just part of a team. I never feel competitive about acting."
"I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism."
"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity."
"I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper."
"The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities."
"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience."
"The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments."
"My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it."
"I didn't grow up acting. I really just started, literally, when I was 18. I just feel like it's a thing of always just experiencing it and growing, as a person."
"But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me."
"There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, 'Yes, I've got dreams, of course I've got dreams.' Then they put the box away and bring it out once in awhile to look in it, and yep, they're still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, 'How good or how bad am I?' That's where courage comes in."
"It wasn't until I got older that I realized acting was something I could really do."
"When we change our daily lives - the way we think, speak and act - we change the world."
"I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous."
"To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves."
"I was taken by the romanticism of being thought of as an adult and living in a world that was completely new to me. I fell in love with acting then."
"I ran spotlight. Swept up. Did box office. Ran the lighting board. But acting was the most fun."
"Quit acting like a wolf, and feel the shepherd's love filling you."
