Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.

Everything I'm teaching you about acting has one aim only: to fire you up emotionally and behaviorally so that you can give a vivid, involving, and memorable performance.

You must create the character's internal life. What do I mean by internal life? I mean the thoughts, feelings, memories, and inner decisions that may not be spoken. When we look into the eyes of actors giving fully realized performances, we can see them thinking. We're interested in what they're experiencing that may never be spoken, that quality of nonverbal expression - which is as much a part of the characters as breathing and as real as what they say and do. This is their internal life. It helps us believe in the characters and care about them.

Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.

It's not enough to identify the Superobjective intellectually; you have to justify it, to find the emotional drive behind it. You need your own specific interpretation of the superobjective so that every time you think of it, it makes you emotional and drives you into action.

I call this book The Intent to Live because great actors don't seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living.

A good or great performance is like peeling an onion; in every scene you reveal another layer, something the audience hasn't seen until then. They stay involved because they are constantly learning about and discovering the character they are watching. They can't take you for granted and it keeps them hooked.