If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don’t have it don’t bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can’t fake emotion.
Being an actor is a religious calling because you’ve been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.
Courage means willing to risk everything.
With a developed imagination there’s no place you can’t go.
Transfer the point of concentration to some object outside of yourself – another person, a puzzle, a broken plate that you are gluing.
Every little moment has a meaning all its own.
WHY is the most important word in an actor’s vocabulary.
Listen with your gut, not your head.
Technique is something that you use if you need it. Otherwise, to hell with it.
Find in yourself those human things which are universal.
You know it’s all right to be wrong, but it’s not all right not to try.
The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.
The greatest piece of acting or music or sculpture or what-have-you always has its roots in the truth of human emotion.
The text is your greatest enemy.
Acting in a scene is like paddling a canoe from a pebbly beach on to the river, the writer builds the canoe, and the actor provides the river. The river is the actor’s thoughts and emotions.
Acting is not talking, it’s living off the other fellow!!!
That’s very different, picking up the impulse instead of picking up the cue.
Acting can be fun. Don’t let it get around.
There’s no such thing as nothing.
To be inventive, to have ideas, is an organic part of being talented.
One can use standard principles and textbooks in educating people for law, medicine, architecture, chemistry or almost any other profession – but not for the theater. For, in most professions, every practitioner uses the same tools and techniques, while the actor’s chief instrument is himself. And since no two persons are alike, no universal rule is applicable to any two actors in exactly the same way.