Best Acting Quotes

There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.

I was changing a light bulb over Groucho Marx's bed, so I took my shoes off, got on his bed and changed the bulb. When I got off the bed he said: 'That's the best acting you've ever done.

People were confused by me, and at first I was auditioning a lot for the crazy characters or the victim, someone who'd been attacked. Which is great, because usually those are the best acting roles.

The Marine Corps is some of the best acting training you could have. Having that responsibility for people's lives, suddenly time becomes a really valuable commodity and you want to make the most of it. And for acting, you just have to do the work, just keep doing it.

Groucho Marx, in his later days, gave me the best review I've ever had and probably will ever have. I changed a light bulb over his bed, and when I came off of his bed with the used one after putting the new one in, Groucho said, 'That's the best acting I've ever seen you do.'

A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.

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.

I think the best acting is when you allow yourself to be kind of vulnerable in the moment.

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

We made one film called Thy Neighbor's Wife in which I got flogged at the public whipping post for adultery. I did my best acting in that film, I guess.

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

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.

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.

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.

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

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

When you stand on the stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world, and that what you say is so important the whole world must listen.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.

The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

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.

The best acting is instinctive. It's not intellectual, it's not mechanical, it's instinctive.

Find in yourself those human things which are universal.

The greatest inspiration I draw upon is, is this city (New York) and riding the subway and watching people and I find that's kind of like the best, the best acting teacher. You know, I wonder, like people who have huge celebrity, sometimes I feel bad, should this be one of their methods 'cause I don't know how they can observe life anymore, because they become the observed. So, I, I appreciate that New York can still do that.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place.

An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.

The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.

To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

Speaking of Oscars, I would win overwhelmingly if the Academy gave an Oscar for faking orgasms. I have done some of my best acting convincing my partners I was in the throes of ecstasy.