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Acting Quotes

Jean Paul Sartre once commented that acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience. When a good actor performs on screen, people get to think ‘I can do that, that’s not so special’ because they don’t feel that he/she forcefully does something. The logic which doesn’t knock on their mind’s door is that it is very hard to act in a way to make people believe that the thing they watch is not a movie or drama but a life. As an age old saying, we all are actors in a play called life. Read these quotes to take a trip through the minds of great actors and get tips on acting from them.

Johnny Depp

With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.

Acting
Johnny Depp
Walter Winchell

Hollywood is where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors.

Entertainment Hollywood Movies
Walter Winchell
Cameron Diaz

Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better.

Advice Practice Groundwork Thinking
Cameron Diaz
Cameron Diaz

Acting allows me to tell a lot of stories, you know start at the beginning, finish at the end, and tell everything in between. Modelling is just an image.

Attitude Observation Perception Storytelling
Cameron Diaz
Gene Tierney

My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.

Reason Hollywood Information Movies
Gene Tierney
Nicole Kidman

I love acting, but it's much more fun taking the kids to the zoo.

Love Fun Acting
Nicole Kidman
Gene Tierney

Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

Profession Being Yourself Career Experience
Gene Tierney
Walter Scott

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

Farming Paradox Benefit Contradiction
Walter Scott
Gene Tierney

The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.

Attitude Observation Opinion Thinking
Gene Tierney
Leonardo DiCaprio

Money was always on my mind when I was growing up. So I was always wondering how we were going to afford this and that. Acting seemed to be a shortcut out of the mess.

Money Mind Acting
Leonardo DiCaprio
Robin Williams

Comedy is acting out optimism.

Optimism Comedy Acting
Robin Williams
William S. Burroughs

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

Acting
William S. Burroughs
Kurt Cobain

I'm too busy acting like I'm not Naive. I've seen it all, I was here first.

Busy Acting
Kurt Cobain
Leonardo DiCaprio

Don't think for a moment that I'm really like any of the characters I've played. I'm not. That's why it's called 'acting'.

Acting
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio

I've been planted here to be a vessel for acting... That's why I'm really taking any part, regardless of how complicated it's going to be.

Acting
Leonardo DiCaprio
Stephen Colbert

My mom kind of led me toward acting. She wanted to be an actress when she was younger. That made me interested in it when I was a kid, because she and I are very close.

Acting
Stephen Colbert
William Wordsworth

A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.

Mind Acting
William Wordsworth
Richard Burton

I don't have tremendous physical vitality since I had a neck operation, and I'm more aware than I used to be of the tedium of acting.

Acting
Richard Burton
Simone Weil

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.

Respect Acting
Simone Weil
W. H. Auden

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Acting
W. H. Auden
George Eliot

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Life Nothing Acting
George Eliot
Lord Byron

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

Good Acting
Lord Byron
Aristotle

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Quality Acting
Aristotle
Oprah Winfrey

Acting is about going into the space, and there are just some places that I'm not willing to go.

Space Acting
Oprah Winfrey
Robin Williams

When I went home from Juilliard, I couldn't find acting work.

Work Home Acting
Robin Williams
Drew Barrymore

Going back to Georgiana Drew and John Drew, and my great-grandfather Maurice Barrymore, and it was such a sort of circus of odd, interesting people that loved acting.

People Acting
Drew Barrymore

I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act.

Argument / Debate Being Yourself Comparisons Thinking
Anonymous