Never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you.

The life of a character should be an unbroken line of events and emotions, but a play only gives us a few moments on that line - we must create the rest to portray a convincing life.

All action in theatre must have inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real.

In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

The main difference between the art of the actor and all other arts is that every other [non-performing] artist may create whenever he is in the mood of inspiration. But the artist of the stage must be the master of his own inspiration, and must know how to call it forth at the hour announced on the posters of the theatre. This is the chief secret of our art.

You must be so thoroughly immersed in the given circumstances of the play, then you decide what it is at any given moment what that the actor wants.

Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.