Quotations and Poems

» “You are not in business to be popular.”
– Kirstie Alley

»  ”We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.”
– Henri Frederic Amiel

»  ”The actors today really need the whip hand. They’re so lazy. They haven’t got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
– W. H. Auden

»  ”I don’t get acting jobs because of my looks.”
– Alec Baldwin

»  ”Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.”
– Ellen Barkin

»  ”For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.”
– Ethel Barrymore

»  ”The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.”
– Roland Barthes

»  ”For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.”
– Sarah Bernhardt

»  ”Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It’s a bum’s life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.”
– Marlon Brando

»  ”To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.”
– Marlon Brando

»  ”The hardest part has been maintaining a small head — remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don’t want that to happen to me.”
– Brandy

»  ”A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.”
– Bertolt Brecht

»  ”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

»  ”The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony — whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals — but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping — the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.”
– Peter

»  ”From ‘86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, ”You would have made a great James Bond! Weren’t you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been.” Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn’t say no to it this time around.”
– Pierce Brosnan

»  ”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

»  ”I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don’t come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.”
– Michael Caine

»  ”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

»  ”The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.”
– Thomas Campbell

»  ”Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.”
– Jim Carrey

»  ”The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.”
– Miguel De Cervantes

»  ”The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.”
– Charlie Chaplin

»  ”Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it they reject themselves.”
– Chevy Chase

»  ”When an actor has money, he doesn’t send letters, but telegrams.”
– Anton Chekhov

»  ”An actor is only merchandise.”
– Chow Yun-Fat

»  ”I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.”
– Glenn Close

»  ”To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

»  ”Celebrity is death — celebrity — that’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor.”
– John Cusack

»  ”Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That’s Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. [On his acting techniques]“
– Vincent D’Onofrio

»  ”I am the Fred Astaire of karate.”
– Jean-Claude Van Damme

»  ”Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.”
– Marion Davies

»  ”You name it and I’ve done it. I’d like to say I did it my way. But that line, I’m afraid, belongs to someone else.”
– Sammy Davis Jr.

»  ”The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.”
– Bette Davis

»  ”I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don’t remember ever having seen one weep.”
– Denis Diderot

»  ”I’d prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It’s such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don’t and they’re like, ”They’re trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she’s looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.”
– Minnie Driver

»  ”I find myself fascinating.”
– Richard Dryfus

»  ”I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”
– Elaine Dundy

»  ”She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity — and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the ”woman of wax” whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”Acting doesn’t bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.”
– Marguerite Duras

»  ”Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.”
– Eugene Field

»  ”Show me a great actor and I’ll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you’ve seen the devil.”
– W. C. Fields

»  ”The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.”
– Minnie Fiske

»  ”The best actors do not let the wheels show.”
– Henry Fonda

»  ”A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.”
– Jane Fonda

»  ”You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.”
– Jane Fonda

»  ”I’m an assistant storyteller. It’s like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I’m waiting on six million people a week, if I’m lucky. [On being an actor]“
– Harrison Ford

»  ”The actor’s popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.”
– Edwin Forrest

»  ”I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.”
– Judy Garland

»  ”If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.”
– Boy George

»  ”An actor is a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, he ain’t listening.”
– George Glass

»  ”Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.”
– Jeff Goldblum

»  ”Acting is happy agony.”
– Sir Alec Guiness

»  ”More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”
– Uta Hagen

»  ”Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.”
– Robert Half

»  ”A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar — you pretend it’s not there.”
– Daryl Hannah

»  ”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

»  ”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

»  ”Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.”
– Katharine Hepburn

»  ”It’s a business you go into because your an egocentric. It’s a very embarrassing profession.”
– Katharine Hepburn

»  ”The most minor gifts and not a very high class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.”
– Katharine Hepburn

»  ”If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.”
– Katharine Hepburn

»  ”I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.”
– Alfred Hitchcock

»  ”You reach a point where you say you’re not going to do juveniles any longer.”
– Ron Howard

»  ”I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.”
– Holly Hunter

»  ”Talk to them about things they don’t know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn’t, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that’s about all there is to it.”
– John Huston

»  ”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

»  ”Actors often behave like children, and so we’re taken for children. I want to be grown up.”
– Jeremy Irons

»  ”In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.”
– Washington Irving

»  ”Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.”
– Glenda Jackson

»  ”Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You’re never as good as you’d like to be. So there’s always something to hope for.”
– Glenda Jackson

»  ”I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.”
– Elton John

»  ”An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.”
– Alva Johnson

»  ”Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.”
– Samuel Johnson

»  ”Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of ”artistic” expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.”
– Patrick Kavanagh

»  ”I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera — both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.”
– Kevin Kline

»  ”I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples’ mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!”
– Angela Lansbury

»  ”I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren’t paying me for my acting, for God’s sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.”
– Lucy Lawless

»  ”I don’t do T & A very well because I haven’t got much of either.”
– T