Acting Quotes

I'm now learning how to distinguish when I'm acting and when I'm not acting - offstage as well as onstage.

Well, acting was just in me and I tried to avoid it. I didn't want to do what my parents did, you know?

I did theatre when I was nine, I think. Nine and ten, and that was just the beginning of my whole involvement in acting, my whole interest. I don't really remember it that well. But it was really fun. I mean, it was exciting just to be on stage in front of an audience. It gives you a different kind of rush.

Acting is great. You spend your whole life trying to get it right.

Periodically over the years I've always taken periods of time away from acting.

Acting allows me the freedom to let go, to be in the moment, to be spontaneous. I no longer have the fear of losing, of failure.

Acting engenders and harbours qualities that are best left way behind in adolesence.

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.

I love acting, but I want to explore other things.

Sitting at the table during Color Purple and looking up and suddenly realizing I was acting in front of Steven Spielberg, was pretty cool. It was pretty good.

My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

I got into acting to avoid politics of any sort so I could remain in a fantasy world.

Literally, I think I've quit acting three or four times, only for a few days. Maybe for a few weeks.

I think acting is definitely the most fulfilling, because it's the most challenging in my mind.

I like talking. I like acting.

When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task.

Right before I got 'Sons of Anarchy,' I actually quit acting for 18 months and didn't read a single script, and I wrote a film. I felt like I needed to do something that I had control over, as an artist, and also just do something where I felt like I had some control over my life, as just a human, out in the world.

Acting gave me the opportunity to do outrageous things. It allowed me to be sad, happy, angry and lustful, even if it was just vicariously.

Whenever you're in any acting role you are mortgaging your own character.

Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.

My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it.

When I went to Los Angeles right after high school, I got some acting jobs, and I never, ever wanted to be an actress! Public speaking and acting make me want to vomit. But I have never been nervous singing. When it comes to public speaking, I stumble on my words, sweat, and pull at my clothes.

I was equally in love with singing and acting from an early age.

Now my drug is writing or acting, being creative.

Some of the newer folks in the industry, I'm not sure they are familiar with the term acting. They don't understand what it means to play a character rather than just be a personality.

But I'm not objective when I'm acting.

The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.

I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.

Acting is not about knowing all this stuff; it's about character.