Famous Quotes about Acting and Actors (142 Quotations)

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera — both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

I'd prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It's such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don't and they're like, ''They're trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she's looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.

I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky. [On being an actor]

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

I'm not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

Imagination, industry, and intelligence — ''the three I s'' — are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum.

Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade.