These acting quotes will inspire you. Acting is the art or occupation of performing in plays, movies, or television productions.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging acting quotes, acting sayings, and acting proverbs.
Famous Acting Quotes
- “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” ~ Walt Disney
- “I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.” ~ Al Pacino
- “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.” ~ Johnny Depp
-
“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” ~ Napoleon Hill
- “Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “I’m not a film star; I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.” ~ Vivien Leigh
- “They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.” ~ William Hazlitt
-
“Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
- “It’s an acting job – acting natural.” ~ Alistair Cooke
- “There is no overacting, only untrue acting.” ~ Stellan Skarsgard
- “I am a proud participant of the Spencer Tracy School of Acting: Know your lines, don’t bump into the furniture.” ~ Danny Bonaduce
-
“Empathy is at the heart of the actor’s art.” ~ Meryl Streep
- “Only the gentle are ever really strong.” ~ James Dean
- “I’m sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.” ~ Ralph Fiennes
- “An actress must never lose her ego — without it she has no talent.” ~ Norma Shearer
-
“Acting is not being emotional, but being able to fully express emotion.” ~ Kate Reid
- “The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “It’s the actors who are prepared to make fools of themselves who are usually the ones who come to mean something to the audience.” ~ Christian Bale
- “Acting means living, it’s all I do.” ~ Morgan Freeman
-
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ~ Scott Adams
- “I’m involved in some action scenes, so they’ll train me for that. I’ll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.” ~ Aaliyah
- “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.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “Celebrity is death – celebrity – that’s the worst thing that can happen to an actor.” ~ Glenn Close
-
“Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don’t see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.” ~ Ninon de L’Enclos
- “The real joy is in constructing a sentence. But I see myself as an actor first because writing is what you do when you are ready and acting is what you do when someone else is ready.” ~ Steve Martin
- “Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” ~ George Burns , Fake acting quotes
- “There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.” ~ Marilyn Monroe
-
“Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.” ~ Wayne Dyer
- “Acting doesn’t have anything to do with listening to the words. We never really listen, in general conversation, to what the other person is saying. We listen to what they mean. And what they mean is often quite apart from the words. When you see a scene between two actors that goes really well you can be sure they’re not listening to each other – they’re feeling what the other person is trying to get at. Know what I mean?” ~ Jack Lemmon
- “The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.” ~ John Lithgow
- “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” ~ Oscar Wilde , Love acting quotes
-
“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.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “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.” ~ Glenda Jackson
- “There still remains to mortify a wit The many-headed monster of the pit.” ~ Alexander Pope
- “The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip.” ~ Paulo Coelho
-
“This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew.” ~ Philip Massinger
- “Who teach the mind its proper face to scan, And hold the faithful mirror up to man.” ~ Robert Lloyd
- “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
- “In life, as on the stage, it’s not who I am but what I do that’s the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit.” ~ Stella Adler , Acting quotes in life
-
“Vadim changed my mind about acting. Vadim was the only man who was certain I had something special to offer.” ~ Brigitte Bardot
- “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
- “Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.” ~ Meryl Streep
- “It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.” ~ Tim Ferriss
-
“Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept.” ~ Laurette Taylor
- “A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist.” ~ Constantin Stanislavski
- “To be an actor you have to be a child.” ~ Paul Newman
- “When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn’t acting. It’s following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.” ~ James Dean
-
“I love acting and don’t find it to be very hard. I recognize when I’ve nailed it, and I can be very proud of myself.” ~ Ewan McGregor
- “You know, be an actor because you love to act. Don’t be an actor because you think you’re going to get famous, because that’s luck.” ~ Whoopi Goldberg
- “When an acting teacher tells a student ‘that wasn’t honest work’ or ‘that didn’t seem real,’ what does this mean? In life, we are rarely ‘truthful’ or ‘honest’ or ‘real’. And characters in plays are almost never ‘truthful’ or ‘honest’ or ‘real’. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.” ~ Stella Adler
- “If there’s any message to my work, it is ultimately that it’s OK to be different, that it’s good to be different, that we should question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who looks different, behaves different, talks different, is a different color.” ~ Johnny Depp
-
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” ~ Edmund Burke
- “An actress can only play a woman. I’m an actor, I can play anything.” ~ Whoopi Goldberg
- “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.” ~ Rodney Dangerfield
- “I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.” ~ Tim Robbins
-
“I don’t think anybody can be told how to act. I think you can give advice. But you have to find your own way through it.” ~ Judi Dench
- “Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.” ~ George Eliot
- “You must have a twinkle in your eye, a naughtiness – and the audience must realize your mind is working faster than your words.” ~ Jeremy Brett
- “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.” ~ Stella Adler
-
“The exciting part of acting, I don’t know how else to explain it, are those moments when you surprise yourself.” ~ Tom Cruise
- “I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.” ~ Ben Kingsley
- “What I enjoy most is traveling to different places and meeting new people. For me, it’s all about life experiences, and I’m very grateful that acting allows me so many interesting and fulfilling ones.” ~ Jensen Ackles
-
“I was just a cheap little starlet hardly acting at all in a very mediocre film.” ~ Brigitte Bardot
- “I love the stage, I love the process of acting in theatre, but unfortunately, it doesn’t pay the bills.” ~ Kabir Bedi
- “Acting is a tough business, and you need to be in good shape mentally and physically.” ~ Juliette Binoche
Acting is the art or practice of representing a character on a stage or before cameras.
