25 quotes about the theatre and acting for your Saturday morning breakfast.
- 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.The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.”
~ Stella Adler - [Human beings] will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.
~ Ernst Levy - 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 behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.
~ Sanford Meisner - There’s nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.
~ Tim Robbins - Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.
~ Bette Davis - That’s what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules.
~Gerardine Clark - 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.
~ George Bernard Shaw - Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
~ Bette Davis - Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
~ Meryl Streep - Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!
~ Craig MacDonald - Find in yourself those human things which are universal.
~ Sanford Meisner - An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.
~ Michael Chekhov - 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 - Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.
~ Michael Shurtleff - 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.
~ Gene Hackman - Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.
~ Michael Shurtleff - I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.
~ Meryl Streep - Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.
~ William Esper - Listening is not merely hearing. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is active.
~ Michael Shurtleff - Actors die so loud.
~ Henry Miller - I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
~ Oscar Wilde - If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.
~ Thornton Wilder - Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.
~ Michael Shurtleff - Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
~ Stella Adler
Act Out 