Quotations on Acting and Actors

I do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. that is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I love acting. It is so muchmore real than life.

~ Oscar Wilde

The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.

~ Oscar Wilde

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

~ Jean Anouilh

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

~ W.C. Fields

I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight year...

~ Will Rogers

Scratch an actor - and you'll find an actress.

~ Dorothy Parker

It 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

Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.

~ George Sanders

The actor is not quite a human being - but then, who is?

~ George Sanders

I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.

~ Bette Davis

The physical labor actors have to do wouldn't tax an embryo.

~ Neil Simon

If there is anything unsettling to the stomach; it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

~ Marlon Brando

Disney, of course, has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor, he just tears him up.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

We're actors - we're the opposite of people.

~ Tom Stoppard

Some of the greatest love affairs I've known have involved one actor - unassisted.

~ Wilson Mizner

You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.

~ Michael Wilding

The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.

~ Alexander Woollcott

Ac actor's success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.

~ Fred Allen

Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead.

~ Louise Brooks

Actors are crap.

~ John Ford

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

~ Henry Fonda

Acting is happy agony.

~ Alec Guinness

You need three things in the theatre--the play, the actors and the audience, - and each must give something.

~ Kenneth Haigh

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

~ Paul Newman

I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.

~ Lilli Palmer

Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.

~ Kate Reid

An agent is a guy who's sore because an actor gets ninety percent of what he makes.

~ Alva Johnston

To be a success, an actress must have the face of Venus, the brain of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

~ Ethel Barrymore