In the given circumstances you must be rooted in the play. Do not depart from the play. Don’t cut yourself off from your partner in the scene, or partners.
Never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you.
Unless the theatre can ennoble you, make you a better person, you should flee from it.
You’ll never see any two good actors approach a role in the same way.
In every physical action, unless it is purely mechanical, there is concealed some inner action, some feelings. This is how the two levels of life in a part are created, the inner and the outer. They are intertwined. A common purpose brings them together and reinforces the unbreakable bond.
In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.
It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings we cannot always analyse.
In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel.
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.
Fear your admirers! Learn in time to hear, understand, and love the cruel truth about yourselves!
Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.
Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.
The theatre infects the audience with its noble ecstasy.
When we are on stage, we are in the here and now.
Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.
The greatest wisdom is to realize one’s lack of it.
Talent is nothing but a prolonged period of attention and a shortened period of mental assimilation.
Young actors, fear your admirers! Learn in time, from your first steps, to hear, understand and love the cruel truth about yourselves. Find out who can tell you that truth and talk of your art only with those who can tell you the truth.
When you’re playing a character who’s cruel, look for the places where he’s kind. When you’re playing a character who is unhappy, look for the places where he has a glint of merriment.
When an actor is completely absorbed by some profoundly moving objective so that he throws his whole being passionately into its execution, he reaches a state we call inspiration.