Acting Quotes

“It was just as well I found acting because I had no aptitude for anything else.”

“When I started in films, it never really occurred to me that I could make a career out of acting.”

“When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years, to the great relief of my father, whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.”

“I always want to be as good in the part as I possibly can. But I make no pretensions of being the greatest actor in the world.”

“I understand acting and I understand actors. I don't really understand the world of celebrity. That's just bizarre.”

“I feel very privileged working with other actors. Actors tend to be the best company I know.”

“I go by the role pretty much. And I think the only genre I haven't gotten to do but I'd love to is a western, but no one has ever asked me to do that.”

“I've worked all my life to shed myself of any character.”

“As much as possible, I try to encourage people to use stunt men because that is really their job.”

“When I went home from Juilliard, I couldn't find acting work.”

“I'm much more open to being a supporting actor right now. At the age of 60, I'll be second fiddle. Fine. I'm happy to do it.”

“People don't yell nasty things at actors; they let them continue.”

“What I observed about my fellow actors was that most gave up very easily.”

“It doesn't interest me to be Harrison Ford. It interests me to be Mike Pomeroy and Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan. I don't want to be in the Harrison Ford business.”

“My approach to acting is the "let's pretend" school of acting.”

“Starring in a science-fiction film doesn't mean you have to act science fiction.”

“I rarely play a real person, because I don't think I'm a good imitator.”

“I am Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor.”

“I was acting when I was playing baseball.”

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

Meryl Streep

"Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four."

Katharine Hepburn

"The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy."

Meryl Streep

"The only thing you owe the public is a good performance."

Humphrey Bogart

"Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse."

Marlon Brando

"Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real."

Laurence Olivier