acting

Sometimes playing stupid opens your eyes to the truth.

It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.

He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced__ntil every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.

When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all__ecause all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

Actors in any capacity, artists of any stripe, are inspired by their curiosity, by their desire to explore all quarters of life, in light and in dark, and reflect what they find in their work. Artists instinctively want to reflect humanity, their own and each other's, in all its intermittent virtue and vitality, frailty and fallibility.

She was merely an actress who had been forced to perform her part on stage without fully knowing her lines. She was not real.

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.

If you don't interfere with me, I'll always do something really good.

I had the privilege of being able to choose, or at least have the opportunity to work at, being anything but an actor.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

His intuition was luminous from the instant you met him. So was his intelligence. A lot of actors act intelligent, but Philip was the real thing: a shining, artistic polymath with an intelligence that came at you like a pair of headlights and enveloped you from the moment he grabbed your hand, put a huge arm round your neck and shoved a cheek against yours; or if the mood took him, hugged you to him like a big, pudgy schoolboy, then stood and beamed at you while he took stock of the effect. (About Philip Seymour Hoffman)

Spencer Tracy, when asked for advice on acting, said, __now your lines and don__ bump into the furniture._ James Cagney said, __alk in, plant your feet, look the other fellow in the eye and_tell the truth._ With all due respect to both of these giant talents, I would have to say there__ something more. The true creation of a being, a character other than one__ self, for me is comparable to a mystical or spiritual experience. To stand in another person__ shoes. To see as he sees, to hear as he hears. To know what he knows, and to do all this with a sense of control, a mastering of the dramatic moment, there must be more than a __atural talent_ at work.

In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks

Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn__ remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.