Actor

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David Thoreau

Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.
John Gielgud

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.
Susan Sontag

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde

Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
Rosalind Russell

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.
Gail Godwin

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don’t see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.
Ninon de Lenclos

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
Haile Selassie

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Gustav Jung

As in a theatre, the eyes of men, after a well-graced actor leaves the stage, are idly bent on him that enters next.
William Shakespeare

Life’s like a play; it’s not the length but the excellence of the acting that matters.
Seneca

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Oscar Wilde

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.
Rodney Dangerfield

Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: – by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
Adolf Hitler

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.
William Hazlitt

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.
Jack Lemon

Actors must practice restraint, else think what might happen in a love scene.
Cedric Hardwicke

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
Bette Davis

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal – falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.
Francois Truffaut

The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.
Laurence Olivier, Sir

Acting is happy agony.
Jean-Paul Sartre

For fast acting relief, try slowing down.
Lily Tomlin

This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.
Omar Bradley

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

When [actors] are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor.
Cedric Hardwicke

Lots of people act well, but few people talk well. This shows that talking is the more difficult of the two.
Oscar Wilde

Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Seems like everyone’s an actor or an actor’s best friend, I wonder what was wrong to begin with that they should all have to pretend.
Ani Difranco

Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
Bette Davis

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.
Bette Davis

Act well at the moment, and you have performed a good action to all eternity.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

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

It is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting: what it won’t have it won’t have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
D.H. Lawrence

Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent of the performance.
Shirley Booth

The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Robert Anderson

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
George Eliot

The leader shows that style is no substitute for substance, that creating an impression is more potent than acting from one’s center.
Lao Tzu