acting

Anyone can act if he has the will to do so, and anyone who says he wants to but doesn't have the knack for it suffers from a lack of will, not a lack of talent.

Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.

I don't think about a role as positive or negative. If I can play it convincingly, then I feel satisfied as an actor

Think slowly like a snail, act fast like a cheetah.

It is impossible to get rid of the bondage of slavery, if we do not start acting as free citizens of our country

MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it__ a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it__ a show. They don__ understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don__ remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting.

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She__ clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I__ walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she__ made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young__o keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I__ an actress playing a part. I__ afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don__ want to leave. It__ utterly selfish but I don__ care. After all, I__ no older than they____e just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don__ retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

It was a relief to inhabit someone else's life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character's problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

Physicality is the basis of performance.

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet_. I__ an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel