Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience." - Larry Moss
"Nothing so distinguishes great acting -- in any style, in any historical period -- than the feeling that the actor has the potential to 'go off' at any moment, and to unleash an explosion -- a flood of lava, that will be totally uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Great Acting always dances with danger!" - Robert Cohen
If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience." - Jack Lemon
"An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama. We are taught to avoid trouble [so] actors don't realize they must go looking for it. Plays are written about...the extraordinary, the unusual, the climaxes. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance." - Michael Shurtleff
"An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment - his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego." - Alec Guinness
"Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation." - Bette Davis
"You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors." - Stella Adler
"Great acting is not easy; anyone who says it is is either shallow or a charlatan. And one of the hardest things about acting is admitting that it is hard." - Robert Cohen
"An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words." - Sanford Meisner
"One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap." - Stella Adler
"We don't live for realities, but for the fantasies, the dreams of what might be. If we lived for reality, we'd be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going...When you are acting, don't settle for anything less than the biggest dream for your character's future." - Michael Shurtleff
"For most actors, success is achieved through study, struggle, preparation, infinite trial and error, training, discipline, experience and work!" - Robert Cohen
"Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality." - Lee Strasberg
"Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience." - Paul Newman - Pictured"Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen." - Uta Hagen
"Talent is as common as horseshit in a stable. The cultivation of it is extremely rare." - Eric Morris
"Honesty isn't enough for me. That becomes very boring. If you can convince people what you're doing is real and it's also bigger than life -- that's exciting." - Gene Hackman
“You're more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action. So act! Whatever it is you know you should do, do it.”him." - Joseph Chaikin
"In 'real life' the mother begging for her child's life, the criminal begging for a pardon, the atoning lover pleading for one last chance -- these people give no attention whatever to their own state, and all attention to the state of that person from whom they require their object. This outward-directedness brings the actor in 'real life' to a state of magnificent responsiveness and makes his/her progress thrilling to watch. On the stage, similarly, it is the progress of the outward-directed Actor, who behaves with no regards to his/her personal state, but with all regard for the responses of his antagonists, which thrills the viewers." - David Mamet
“An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.” - Francois Truffaut
"Acting is simple, joyous, care-free fun! Acting is child's play. And yet acting must be a matter of life and death, too, all at once."
