Quotes About Acting

We have so much access to one another through technology and everything else, that we're very much used to people being real. When folks go on TV and they're basically acting - if they were good actors they'd be acting and paid for it for a living, but they're not good actors. When we see bad acting, it doesn't look like bad acting, it looks weird, and we are turned off by it. I'm not talking about anybody in particular, that's just politics right now. This generation, I feel like, has incredible bullshit detectors.

For me, the real goal is to integrate. The thing that I'm most happy with is the fact that I've been able to keep doing all of it - to keep writing, and to keep acting in movies, and to keep acting on the stage, to keep directing plays. I find that they feed each other, and that I learn about acting from directing and I learn about writing from acting.

Singing is a way of releasing an emotion that you sometimes can't portray when you're acting. And music moves your soul, so music is the source of the most intense emotions you can feel. When you hear a song and you're acting it's incredible. But when you're singing a song and you're acting it's even more incredible.

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

The most significant piece of advice my father gave me early on about acting was, don't get caught acting. Really believe in what you're doing and then commit to it. Even if it feels uncomfortable, even if you feel that you're gonna look like an ass. It's all acting, but find the truth in a moment as opposed to just pretending you have and rather than trying to act your way out of it.

My whole thing is I want to have a backup plan because maybe I won't get another acting job after 'Fame', maybe I'll want to give up on acting in five years or whatever and I want to have something else that I enjoy just as much as I enjoy acting.

I'd also take any acting job...well, not any acting job, that's not true. I'd take a cool acting job.

Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.

I think the best models are actors, you're taking on a character. In that sense, I have been acting for a long time. It didn't seem like a crazy transition. Acting is a bigger step into modelling in a way. Modelling is easier when you don't look like yourself. When you look like a different person, you feel different. Acting goes deeper into that, you have to move and talk like that character. I love it.

I wasn't really driven to be an actor or anything, but in college I decided to study acting, much to my parents' disappointment. I attended Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers where Bill Esper was, and that is where I really got hooked on the art of acting, and, almost, the chemistry of acting.

Who do you think, as you gaze at the entire scene in Washington, who is it that's acting like a bunch of children? It isn't Trump. Who is it throwing the tantrums because they didn't get their way? Who is it acting like hysterical spoiled brats because their side lost the game? Who is it that's insisting, because they lost the game, that the rules be changed? Who is it that's acting like any average eight- to nine-year-old kid who's told he can't have any more Twinkies or whatever kids - marijuana; I don't know.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort - and it was cute.

When the scene is over, a lot of people cut. The actors are acting. And they just stop acting. But I think that leaving people in that moment and seeing where else it can go and pushing them to take it further, a lot of special things can happen.

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?

There is a lot of acting that is on the table - precisely, good acting. The best movies of mine are the ones that really nobody saw. The Groomsmen, Playing By Heart and Seeing Other People are by far the work I'm the most proud of.

You know policy is driven purely in self interest. The Federal Reserve Bank and the commercial banks and the Wall Street banks are not acting in the interests of the population at large, they're acting purely in their own self-interest, which is a shame because they're actions dictate the reality for 300 million Americans. But they don't see it that way, they see it only as a way to preserve their own self-interest.

I wanted to be a playwright in college. That's what I was interested in and that's what I was moving toward, and then I had the lucky accident of falling in love with film. I was 19 or 20 that I realized films are made by people. Shooting digitally became cheaper and better. You couldn't make something that looked like a Hollywood film, but you could make something through which you could work out ideas. I was acting, but I was also conceiving the plots and operating the camera when I wasn't onscreen. I got very unvain about film acting, and it became a sort of graduate school for me.

With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

Honestly, as hard a profession as acting is, I think music is even harder. Acting, you're like a leech, because someone else does the hard part for you. They write it for you, then the director tells you what to do. You really just need to know how to pay attention, follow instructions.

At times some people use force or fraud to take from others without willful, voluntary consent. Normally, the initiation of force to take life is murder, to take liberty is slavery, and to take property is theft. It is the same whether these actions are done by one person acting alone, by the many acting against a few, or even by officials with fine hats and titles.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Penn to me are the two best actors of all time. I'm just glad to have the pleasure to be in an era that they're acting while I'm acting. They're probably the best actors in my mind.

I've always enjoyed acting, but there's a part of me that's shied away from living a celebrity life. I don't feel comfortable being noticed all the time. Sometimes I even fantasize about doing things other than acting. But I can remember being back on set the third day of my latest project and going, "Ahh, this is what I have to do for a living." It's what makes me happy.

Acting is acting, as far as I'm concerned and, you know, how you manifest it is, at the end of the day, not the point. It's how it affects the story & how it affects the audience. And if people are hungry to be told stories, using, using this form then there's a reason for that.

Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor.

I'm giving up acting. . . . I'm 66 and there are a number of celebrations I've got to get down on paper, and acting doesn't allow me to do that. It was a hell of a drug, performance. It's a great thrill, especially for a storyteller. But it can go. Directing can go. Writing can't go. And in terms of what lies ahead, I want to have a burning focus - almost like smoke coming up from the paper as I write.

I would love to do more acting; I really would love to do it, particularly character acting. I'm a character type of actor; I love situations where I've got a bit of room to improvise on the character.

We [musicians] are comfortable in front of the camera doing music videos, and it's almost a form of acting when we're doing music videos. We're acting out our own thoughts and what we've written down on paper.

I grew up in Glen Ellyn, which is about 20 miles west of Chicago. I attended Glenbard South High School and University of Illinois. I didn't study acting until I moved to Los Angeles after college, but the fact that I was raised in the Chicago area set the stage for all of my comedic and acting sensibilities.

Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me.

We urge persons with same-gender attractions to control those and to refrain from acting upon them, which is a sin, just as we urge persons with heterosexual attractions to refrain from acting upon them until they have the opportunity for a marriage recognized by God as well as by the law of the land. That is the way to happiness and eternal life.

In fact you can begin to discover and investigate whether you are an actor or not, whether you're in my view, qualified for a life in this profession or in this endeavor by checking yourself out and acting every day, getting plays and scripts and getting together with people and divvying up the parts and acting in one way or another, or writing things.

Acting is different from dance. The black-and-whiteness of dancing is mostly about the technical form - like, this is how people have been doing it for millions of years. You can't let down those ballerinas who died a long time ago. My teacher will say, "This person would be ashamed!" And it's like, oh God. But with acting, it's different because people like something fresh. You can mix it up and create your own thing and it's not necessarily wrong.

Acting. Whenever I am playing a character, I use my real life experiences, which puts me on the line of reliving some of those good and bad times. Acting requires risk, and that's what feeling vulnerable is.

I took my first acting class at age 6 because I found out that's what Carol Burnett was doing - acting. Also she had an imaginary friend as a kid and went to UCLA, two things we have in common. I will always admire her and hope one day, I can make someone laugh a fraction as hard as she's made me bellyache.

I think it's critical in any character you play that it really is about reacting instead of acting. You can always tell when a person is acting.

I love acting. Acting's always been my first love. I grew up watching multi-camera television shows... And I thought I would absolutely be in for that.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.

The process of acting, not necessarily the business of acting, but the actual doing of it in the moment is my greatest kind of personal passion, the thing that brings me alive the most. Also, my two children.

I was studying to be an architect, I wasn't plotting to join the movies. Films were just another career option. I took acting up with the same schoolgirl enthusiasm I had for examinations. Acting is a job and I take it very seriously.

If you're directing and acting, I feel like they both suffer, to some extent. There are so many elements to it. If you do acting and directing, at the same time, it's not going to be as good, I believe, as if you focus on one or the other.

Television is face acting, and film is eye acting.

When it comes to acting on green screen, it doesn't really make all that much of a difference to me because how you interact with your environment or characters is always dictated by your imagination. So when you're acting against a green screen, you have more of an opportunity to create your own world. So what was magical throughout this process was watching this movie come to life with the 3D.

I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it.

I am very happy acting, and just have never gone at, or been bitten by the directing bug to the extent where I'm willing to put acting aside. If offered the opportunity, I think I could do a good job with the right material.

The acting thing is so beyond my control. Acting isn't mine. You're like a tiny piece in this big, corporate mechanism that needs chemistry and divine intervention.

Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting as part of mass-movements, that it's become hard for us to imagine a form of politics that is based on a high degree of introspection and self-examination.