Top 93 Act Three Quotes
#1. If there's a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.
Anton Chekhov
#2. Act One: Get your hero up a tree. Act Two: Throw rocks at him. Act Three: Get him down out of the tree. - attributed to George Abbott, on playwriting
Darrell Fusaro
#3. If my life were like the novels, this would be the dark period in act two after my one true love rejects me, where I reel off to do things I have to apologize for in act three.
Julio Alexi Genao
#4. A.J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn't believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.
Gabrielle Zevin
#5. Act one: put your characters in a tree. Act two: throw rocks at them. Act three: get them down again.
Anonymous
#6. I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.
Stephen J. Cannell
#7. It's all in the opposition of the thumbs. For all we know, whales sing in three act plays - but they can't write them down.
Bronwen Wallace
#8. It's wise to learn how to cook,' Kessligh fumed, 'but a meal prepared over three weeks is inedible! There is wisdom in action! So stop talking, and act!
Joel Shepherd
#9. Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.
Carter G. Woodson
#10. Certainly I'm still mining my experiences as a journalist. I think it's no coincidence that all three of my novels basically are about how people act in a time of catastrophe. Do they go to their best self or their worst self?
Geraldine Brooks
#11. Stories are best when they 'emerge' from the depths, and when built in a painting from early sketch through the three-act process to The End, it is a perfect pathway to the unconscious stories set in our dreamwork.
Billy Cannon
#12. One, you will become what you think about. Two, remember the word imagination. Let your mind soar. Three, courage. Concentrate on your goal everyday. Four, save 10 percent of what you earn and action. Ideas are worthless unless we act on them.
Earl Nightingale
#13. We have three ways to act wisely. First by thinking. That's the noblest. Second by imitating. That's the easiest. And third by experience. This is the bitterest.
Anonymous
#14. For three years, between 16 and 19, I was the opening-act-for-the-opening-act-for-the-opening-act, you know? And then I was on tour with Ice-T, Stetsasonic, EPMD, Sir Mix-a-Lot - legends - and went on to sell 160 million records. It still baffles me.
Vanilla Ice
#15. A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future.
Austin Kleon
#16. Whenever you can, act as a liberator. Freedom, dignity, wealth - these three together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die.
Cyrus The Great
#17. You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.
Jon Favreau
#18. I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.
Suzanne Collins
#19. Franny Armstrong is a mother of three and a grandmother of four. Her husband supports her imagination and has the patience of a saint. She's been writing since she was a child, creating plays to act out in front of the neighborhood children.
Franny Armstrong
#20. The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like.
Maggie O'Farrell
#21. I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.
Phil Jones
#22. Let them see you cry. Let them see you sweat. Let them see you bleed. Those three drops make you human. Never fear to show your humanity. It's the bravest act of all.
Toni Sorenson
#23. I don't like people who have babies and act like they did something that the rest of us can't figure out. Anybody can have one, OK? I could have had three if I had gone through with any of my pregnancies.
Chelsea Handler
#24. For any act to be morally right, three things are necessary: (1) right act, (2) right motive, and (3) right circumstances. If any one of these factors is not right, the act is wrong.
Peter Kreeft
#25. Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.
Marcus Sakey
#26. Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'
Lynda Barry
#27. Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.
Bret Easton Ellis
#28. When we want to know God's will, there are three things which always concur: the inward impulse, the Word of God and the trend of circumstances. Never act until these three things agree.
F.B. Meyer
#29. My team and I used the actual footage to create a three-act story of the life of Ayrton Senna. There are no talking heads and no voiceover. Senna narrates his own epic, dramatic, thrilling journey.
Asif Kapadia
#30. I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.
Jane Campion
#31. Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.
Samuel R. Delany
#32. That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.
Mark Bradford
#33. I think we all live dichotomies. I'm a father of three boys and a loyal homebody sort of husband and father. And yet I act in movies and write and direct movies.
Tim Blake Nelson
#34. My introduction to Woody Allen and to Ethan Coen was at the same time. On Broadway, I starred in a play called 'Relatively Speaking,' which was three one-act comedies, one of which was written by Ethan and one of which was by Woody.
Max Casella
#35. When you're twenty-three and you fall in love, you tend to think that love will supersede any problems. But no matter how much you love somebody, no matter how desperately you want a relationship to work, life can act as an oxidizer and corrode it to pieces.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#36. Even the slash fiction, that's a great way to learn to work. No one really does three-act structure, but just trying to put words that make somebody else turned on, that's going to teach you more about writing than any writing college you can go to.
Steven Moffat
#37. Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.
Howard Berman
#38. There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.
Douglas Brinkley
#39. I studied screenwriting at film school and was constantly learning how to construct three-act dramas.
Tobias Lindholm
#40. I'm down to act a little bit - go on a couple auditions or make one of those three-second cameos with one line.
Charlie Puth
#41. We Indians are Latin America's moral reserve. We act according to a universal law that consists of three basic principles: do not steal, do not lie and do not be idle.
Evo Morales
#42. -they were still practicing the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.
Eva Ibbotson
#43. I have three brothers and a sister. One older and three younger. My oldest brother Danny plays Hyde on 'That '70s Show,' and my younger brother Jordan and my sister Allanah act as well, so we're a bit of an acting family.
Christopher Masterson
#44. I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#45. The music is something outside myself that's also inside myself ... Music and a sense of another presence always went hand in hand. Even when I was three, I would improvise music, and my maternal grandfather would act as an audience and used to applaud. I would imitate things like thunder and rain.
John Tavener
#46. We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.
Anais Nin
#47. For a mother, mornings of young, school-age children are a carefully orchestrated combination of timing, skill, and luck. It's nothing short of an act of God to get three children to school by eight, looking halfway presentable.
Jill Smokler
#48. There is still a lot to be said for the well-made, witty, clever, three-act comedy.
Terry Teachout
#49. These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.
Hari Kunzru
#50. One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.
Justin Cronin
#51. Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.
Kevin Leman
#52. There's no traditional three act structure - or beginning, middle and end - to a family tree. By its nature, it has almost infinite different branches, or episodes, to explore in every direction.
Jim Piddock
#53. A great trick that I learned having worked as a screenwriter for many years, the way screenwriters work, is they break the project down into three-act structure: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3. I think that is a great way to break down any project, whether it's a new business or anything at all.
Steven Pressfield
#54. When your life has had few events to occupy it, it's amazing how a simple encounter can seem like an entire three-act play.
Mary E. Pearson
#55. I wanted to just do a one-act play for 26 minutes, with commercials at the beginning and end. For years, I couldn't get my way. They wanted to interrupt three times.
Norman Lear
#56. A cat is, by and large, sophisticated and complex, and capable of creating three-act plays around any single piece of action.
Gladys Taber
#57. I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.
Tom Bissell
#58. Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life
a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality
then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?
Gloria Steinem
#59. There are three things healthy people most need to do - to be creatively productive, to render service, and to act in accordance with their moral impulses. In all three respects modern society frustrates most people most of the time.
E.F. Schumacher
#60. This is nothing new. We saw this with the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Right Act - constitutional challenges were brought to all three of these monumental pieces of legislation.
Stephanie Cutter
#61. I directed three films and each time [I act] I hope it's the last time so I have time to do my film [directing].
Mathieu Amalric
#62. I went to my last three years of high school in New Jersey. I just wanted to act, you know?
Stacey Dash
#63. With 'Pretty Deadly,' I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a three-act structure in it. I don't know - someone probably can.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#64. The principal House sponsor (of the Defense of Marriage Act), Bob Barr of Georgia has been married three times
which raises the question of why the act doesn't contain a three-strikes-and-you're-out provision.
Frank Rich
#65. Mind, word and act; all three must be filled with the belief that all is His play; that is the genuine path.
Sathya Sai Baba
#66. If I had three wishes for my country, they would be these: keep fighting, keep moving forward, and don't act like a douchebag.
Michael Ian Black
#67. I'll tell you something else too; by the time we're through we shall have had all we can stand of this North woman. I wouldn't mind betting she thinks we have nothing better to do than run around in circles while she gets on with this three-act problem play of hers.
Georgette Heyer
#68. With Angela drawn to the hangdog look and Malachy lonely after three months in jail, there was bound to be a knee-trmbler.
A knee-trmbler is the act itself done up against a wall, man and woman up on their toes, straining so hard their knees tremble with the excitement that's in it.
Frank McCourt
#69. Drink reacts on its practitioners in conflicting ways. One brave can knock off a quart of Scotch and look and act as sober as Herbert Hoover. Another, after three Martinis, makes two-cushion carroms off the chaise lounge as he attempts to negotiate the bathroom.
Tallulah Bankhead
#70. I love stage work. The thing about plays is that they're perfectible. With film, you shoot that take and maybe another. During 'Spamalot,' I rewrote Act II three times.
Eric Idle
#71. God is triune; there are within the Godhead three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the work of salvation is one in which all three act together, the Father purposing redemption, the Son securing it and the Spirit applying it.
J.I. Packer
#72. Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.
Rocky Carroll
#73. The accused were to be tried under a three-hundred-year-old Act. The Treason Act of 1351 had come into being during the reign of Edward III, its purpose to define and limit the number of offences classed as treason. It sill exists today. The
Don Jordan
#74. Sex is a three act play: foreplay, play and afterplay.
Chloe Thurlow
#75. I think that the best television now is giving you a three-act experience.
Carlton Cuse
#76. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the
cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat
could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.
Terry Pratchett
#77. I live by three simple words: compassion, love and gratitude. We need to act on these three words daily. Doing so will irrevocably change your world.
Julian Pencilliah
#78. There's just something "off" about equating the act of spending three years writing a book with the act of someone exploiting themselves by drunkenly flashing the camera for "Girls Gone Wild" or something.
Marie Calloway
#79. I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting
William Shakespeare
#80. I would have to say all of the civil rights acts, because there were three, and even, say, the Immigration Act, which I think also is a civil rights act, maybe on a global perspective, that he cared very, very much about it.
Lynda Bird Johnson Robb
#81. As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.
Nick Harkaway
#82. The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don't act soon.
James Hansen
#83. We think we want all the time in the world with the people we love, but maybe what we need is the opposite. Just a finite amount of time, so we still think the other person is interesting. Maybe we don't need acts two and three. Maybe love is best in act one.
Nicola Yoon
#84. A lot of people think I was an overnight success, but I was an opening act for three or four years, and then I signed my contract with EMI. Then it kind of blew up overnight.
Vanilla Ice
#85. I never really did years of movie-after-movie-after-movie but when you've got three toddlers in the house you're performing all day long, anyway, with puppet shows and stories - I act around the clock.
Julia Roberts
#86. Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.
Marcus Sakey
#87. Acting is contained - you act for three months, then leave it - but writing is the act of creation. Writing is dangerous.
Sophie Marceau
#88. I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.
Anna Friel
#90. In 2002 Mom and I got a chance to act together in a play called 'Pitching to the Star,' with her brother, Robert Lipton. The three of us on the same stage - that was such a special experience for me.
Rashida Jones
#91. What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#92. One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.
Marc Forster
#93. There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.
Charlie Kaufman
