Acting Quotes

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Oscar Wilde

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful -- my personal life suffers.

Al Pacino

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

Roland Barthes

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Aldous Huxley

When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. Before going into a fire, there's the same surge of adrenaline you get just before the camera rolls.

Steve Buscemi

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.

Alva Johnson

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

Elton John

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

William Hazlitt

We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

William Hazlitt

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

William Hazlitt

Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robust periwig-pated fellow, tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings.

William Shakespeare

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you -- tripping on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Leif the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.

William Shakespeare

One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.

Robert Bresson

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes. On filming MacHale's Navy

Bruce Campbell