Quotes About Acting

I watched a film with a very famous, great, great actor, I won't mention his name because everyone loves his memory, but I thought, "God he was acting a lot." Great actor, but nonstop acting. Wall to wall, fitted-carpet 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.

Honestly, acting is the most work when you're unemployed. For me, the actual acting part is never hard. It's the politics and basically everything around the acting that is difficult.

History is basically really looking back and finding out what happened to an individual, a community, a family, a group in a certain event. And so that's why I go, "Wow. That's what acting really is. You find out the background, you get the joy of creating a fictional history of a fictional character and you get to tell a story." So I felt that acting is making history come alive and it became my mode of trying to figure out what this craft of acting is really all about.

One of my heroes is Mr. Sidney Poitier. In his autobiography, "The Measure of a Man," he talks about the difference between being a great person and being a great actor. I'm happiest when I'm acting, and I've dedicated my life to it. Still, as much as I love acting, at the end of the day, I want to be remembered as a great person, first, and as a great actor, second. I believe that acting is a talent while being a great person encompasses so much more: being a good father, a good husband and the ability to show compassion for others.

Good acting is about reacting, not tryingto express something, but reacting to a situation as the character.I don't like acting acting.

If you feel afraid, you can make yourself courageous by acting courageous. If you are feeling unhappy, by deliberately acting happy you can induce happy feeling. If you are lacking in enthusiasm, by simply acting enthusiastic you can make yourself enthusiastic.

Voicing acting is usually fun. I'm very curious about that world. I'm a fan of documentaries, as well, and the voice kind of makes it right. Mostly for me, though, it's all about the acting -you don't have to get hair and makeup and the whole bit. You just can have fun with the acting.

She didn't need to go to acting school to learn that the essence of acting is to act like you're not 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 drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.

With acting, I think half of it is just acting confident. We stand on these red carpets and pose in these dresses, but we're all only so confident. It doesn't mean we think we're great looking or anything. It's all a façade.

For me acting is a passion and an art, and always will only be that. I don't have any rules when it comes to acting. I'll do anything. But it depends on the script. Either I'll have passion for the project or I won't. It's got to fuel me.

No matter what kind of significance leads you do, you learn a lot from doing schlock. The setup's the same, only you have to work twice as hard to make it the best as you can make it. And a lot of acting is not about acting but technology. Are you standing in your light? Are you out of your light? And if the sound guy's near you, please don't put the coffee cup down at that moment, because you're covering your lines. All of that stuff's going on in your head, so you learn a lot by doing whatever. In my view, never worry that something's not prime - A, number - one stuff.

Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid “judgments,” you'll find that you have nothing to say.

I think I'm a better actor now. I mean, I really think I know a lot about acting now. But I didn't know a lot about acting then, in 80's, and I never knew how to be myself. I never knew how to relax and just play it from me. I was always trying to deliver a line.

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.

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

Improv is like writing. It's actually a different discipline to acting. It helps acting greatly, but it's completely different. It's the same side of your brain when you write as when you improv.

I came from the stage so it was a different kind of acting, or a different arena of acting, and I just loved to do it as a kid. It's really gratifying to get to create these different characters and to get to create different voices and to get to wear different clothes.

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.

I got into acting because I wanted to act and I love acting. That's my true north: to be creative and to be challenged in what I love to do.

I still have the desire to do the job of acting. It's just a matter of whether I'll be allowed to do the job of acting that remains to be seen. There are only so many brick walls that I'm willing to beat my head on.

(The) process of acting is no different to conventional screen acting, in that it's providing a perfect interface between the director and the performer. So there's no sort of long way around a viral committee of animators.

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.

I went to theater school in France, and when I finished I thought I would never go back to acting again. I don't want to be acting in theater. It's not for me. I'm sick of all this theater world, all these actors, and all that.

Most people assume because I'm an actor that's all I know about and care about, I'm actually a camera geek and a film geek. I grew up making short films the same time I was acting. For me, it's a motion picture, not a play. I'm just as interested in what the camera department is doing and world building through costume design and production design as I am in acting. I think all good directors do that whether they're an actor or not.

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.

I went through a phase where I was sick of acting, I didn't want to do it anymore, I was bored with it and then I tried directing a movie and I was like: "Shoot, get back over there!" It made me appreciate acting more.

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 was in college, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, I met this girl named Laura who was the most beautiful girl I had ever known, and she was taking an acting class, so I decided to take the same acting class. And I was a terrible actor in college.

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.

But acting is my main profession so it's about finding the right balance. I don't know how, if I went any further with the music, I would manage to do both - I would have to take time off from acting because I couldn't do both at same time. I could do six months on and six months off perhaps. But I'm really proud of the record. I've worked on it for a while and I'm really glad to finally get the album out, having done three EPs prior to its release.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it. I think we ask too many questions of ourselves. We make too much importance of stuff. But I do say to actors when I have taught in classes, or when I sometimes do a talk to a group. I'll say, “If I never acted again, the world wouldn't stop, nor would it stop if I didn't stop acting. That's how important it is. I know it [seems] important when you're young. But I say, “Lighten up. Don't take it all so seriously.” All the gurus and teachers will take your money and run.

When I finally decided to leave school and pursue acting, my parents didn't take it very lightly. My friends thought that it was the tackiest thing they'd ever heard of. Acting was really beneath them. They couldn't believe that I would want to become an actress. Not now, of course.

I'm happiest when I'm acting, and I've dedicated my life to it. Still, as much as I love acting, at the end of the day, I want to be remembered as a great person, first, and as a great actor, second.

What I really like is the marriage of both [writing and acting] - for instance, with Postcards. I don't actually act in it, but I worked on it with Mike [Nichols] as I went along, creating the character, so it was a bit like acting for me.

I have such a strong acting background because I know what I'm looking for, I know what the needs are, and I know acting when I see it.

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.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting... Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like an ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under his control.

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.

I reenact everything. I love to paint a picture for my audience. I'm a lot like Richard Pryor in that aspect. I do a lot of acting on stage, acting out and visualizing stuff. I love to do that. I'm into it so much, it just comes out of me.

It dawned on me that acting was what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing had ever touched my heart like acting did.

The next night I got on an airplane, and flew to New York and looked into acting schools. Four or five acting schools. One of which was the Neighborhood Playhouse, which I started at six months there after.

Social cognitive theory rejects the dichotomous conception of self as agent and self as object. Acting on the environment and acting on oneself entail shifting the perspective of the same agent rather than reifying different selves regulating each other or transforming the self from agent to object

I lay in bed the night before the fishing trip and thought it over, about my being deaf, about the years of not letting on I heard what was said, and I wonder if I can ever act any other way again. But I remembered one thing: it wasn't me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.

I drifted into acting and drifted out. Acting is not everything. Living is.