Quotes About Acting

I was going to be a High School teacher. I was studying at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, up in Canada. I was also acting in a wonderfully supportive theatre community in Edmonton. There's a lot of support for theatre there. So, I was having a great time, but I didn't consider acting as a serious career initially, because even the most successful actors that I know in Edmonton are not super successful. Acting over there is just not a success-oriented career.

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

I'm still learning to be the best actor I can be, and I have a long way to go to get to the level I would like to be at. My focus is still 100% acting acting acting. Once I hit a point where I feel very comfortable as an actor - because you can never stop learning, I don't care how comfortable you get, you can never stop learning - but once I hit a point where I can get that comfort level of taking on the task of directing and having the confidence in myself to have people's respect when I give them direction, that's definitely something I want to do someday.

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 dropped out in middle school. I dropped out in, towards the beginning of the ninth grade. And then I started studying -I started taking acting classes at a, well first I was like in a community theater at that time in Torrance, California, so I finished up like my season with that community theater just acting in, you know, acting in a small part on this play or a big part on that play or a stage manager or assistant stage manager in another play.

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.

Acting is something where you have to completely remove yourself. So, do I find acting easy? Absolutely no! Do I want to do more of it? Do I enjoy doing it? Do I feel appreciative to get this opportunity? Absolutely!

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!

I've been acting since I was young because I wanted to, not because my parents wanted me to. My dad is a principal and mom is a middle school counselor, so acting was like, "Eh, whatever. As long as you get good grades." It's really fun, and nothing more.

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'd always thought that acting was, like, you had to work really hard, you had to change the way you walked, you talked, and all of that. But that's not acting. That's shmacting.

If I didn't get joy from acting, I wouldn't do it. My passion for acting is growing and I love telling good stories and inspiring stories and helping to give a little happiness to the world and perhaps get the audience to think about different issues.

People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much.

I’ve learned in a hundred ways that I rarely regretted acting but often regretted NOT acting fast enough.

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.

Acting was my classroom in many ways and I always believed and I still do that acting is not just about pretending to be someone else, it's also about discovering yourself and reaching deeper inside yourself.

Maybe it's a cultural thing, being Korean, but my first reflex has always been to exude humility - but it doesn't help you in acting. For acting, humility isn't the best thing. It'll weaken your work.

I love the Elvis movies. I used to watch them. In every single one of his movies he wasn't acting as a car salesman - he was acting as a car salesman who loved to play guitar.

Well, I think one of the main things that you have to think about when acting in the movies is to try not to make the acting show.

I guess at a certain point you think, well, singing is singing and acting is acting.

Leonardo is the most incredible actor, on the planet, with a couple of people alongside him. Getting to act with him is just [amazing]. I walked away from my audition for that and I couldn't believe that I'd been acting with him. I've worked with amazing people, but my friends freak out that I'm working with him. I freak out in a geeky acting way. They freak out in a starstruck way. He's Leonardo DiCaprio, and his fame is so big. That's a complete tangent about that.

Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity.

Acting requires focus, too, but acting doesn't, you might say, demand focus. When you're in the ring you don't even have to think about focus because the danger is so imminent. Imminent. You train and you prepare and then the adrenaline kicks in and drives you into focusing intensely. You'd better focus, right? Or else you'll make your exit on a stretcher.

(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.

For me, I've never drawn a distinction between live-action acting and performance-capture acting. It is purely a technology.

It was the desire to do the complete thing. I only took taking acting lessons because my whole thing, really, was to direct. But my first jobs were acting jobs.

I feel like God has moved me into a different way of doing things. I teach basic on-camera acting class called Acting 101...In my classroom, the students get every ounce of encouragement and craft and anything I'm able to give them.We have some rules. We don't take the name of The Lord in vain. We don't use foul language when we mess up on camera...There's a climate of safety...They feel very protected.

I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the '70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.

It's just acting. I take acting seriously but up to a point.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

Ah, but being in love made you mean and crazy. Love made you act like a fool even when you knew you were acting like a fool and couldn't help yourself from acting like a fool.

Writing is as big a part of my career as acting is, financially and time wise. So, yeah, I love it. That's all I wanted to do since I was young was be a writer. So that and acting are the two most important aspects of my career.

I didn't know anything about acting, much less about acting in a comedy.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

I guess part of my ambivalence about pursuing music as well as acting is that acting is already one of the most difficult careers to create for yourself, I must be insane to embark on creating two careers in two of the most difficult fields. But I have really different ambitions with music; I just want to stay in love with music. I want it to continue to be a means of expression for me that feels like it's mine, and something that feels community-based.

There was a time in my acting career, where I was trying to figure out if acting was the thing to do. You know? I was always on this journey of trying to learn more about humanity and people - using the characters and situations as guideposts. I could switch up and do another job as long as I'm continuing that same search and that same journey of revealing my connection to humanity and the universe. And directing gives me the opportunity to explore ALL these different lives and their connection to their environments and the people. And I get to connect to the wires of the universe.

I think [music and acting], they are connected, all that stuff. It's your emotional self, is pretty much how you do it, I think, from whatever place you do it, whether you're acting or you're singing.

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 started acting long before I decided to pursue it. I started acting as an amateur when I was a kid, but I wanted to become a diplomat. It was self-centered and weird, but I had this idea of going out in the world and solving conflicts and making the world a better place.

If there is any sense of order to the universe, acting is what I am meant to do. I'm not manufactured. I know acting isn't real, that it's temporary. If there is any theme to the roles I play, it is emotional vulnerability and availability.

When I was younger, I did work with coach. I went to this place called Actors Space in the Valley. I was pretty young, and we were doing acting and improvisation. But no, no I didn't go to RADA, I didn't do that. But I do now work with an acting coach, primarily for the initial intellectual connection to the material.

It takes so long to write a script, thinking to yourself, "Am I wasting my time? Am I putting everything into this thing that maybe just won't ever exist?" I always think, God, acting is so much easier. At least for acting you have the source material already.

As an actor, it made me realize a really important lesson. I didn't have to put any spin on the ball as Rita [in Dexter]. All I had to do was speak. And there was such simplicity in that as an actor. With Debra, I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole, and it just didn't work, but in my mind, because I had to work so hard on it, I was, like, "Oh, this is acting!" But that's not acting.

Just because we're on schedule is no reason to shoot bad acting. Someone once said to me, 'You're inconsiderate.' And I said, 'Inconsiderate? Bad acting is the ultimate inconsideration.' It's a collective slap to a million faces at the same time.

When you're young, you get by on charm and good looks, not that I miss being charming or good-looking, but then you start to understand things about life, about the craft of acting. You approach it a different way. It's much more fun now than it was, because you take more chances and risks. I enjoy acting now more than when I was young.