Top 100 Acting Art Quotes
#1. Ultimately I found my community by pursuing what I loved: writing, acting, art, coffeehouses.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#2. I wanted to go into art history. Acting fell into my lap when a neighbor took pictures of me and showed them to an agent.
Eva Mendes
#3. Acting is an art and a science and there is more to me then that young blonde kid.
Michael Welch
#4. Men of real talents in Arms have commonly approved themselves patrons of the liberal arts and friends to the poets, of their own as well as former times. In some instances by acting reciprocally, heroes have made poets, and poets heroes.
George Washington
#5. As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste.
Marilyn Monroe
#6. Whether I'm acting or making it, at the end of the day it's telling the story; action, drama. You want the audience to feel it - the story, the action, the scene, or a particular shot. I just keep working on crafting my art, on how to make action movies.
Donnie Yen
#7. Opera is the most complete art form. It includes drama, acting, technology (lighting), art (the sets), dance, and the epitome of the human voices. But mostly, go for the glorious music. The arts are crucial to the life of every community.
Karen DeCrow
#8. Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.
Tod Machover
#9. The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson
#10. Hosting is an art form. Like acting, singing, or comedy hosting is a craft. It's a delicate dance of timing, the ability to read the room, and the art of conversation.
Todd Newton
#11. Everybody has some talents - we all have an art side and some talent - but you have some areas where you are better than others. My area is acting, I guess. I hope.
Olivier Martinez
#12. Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
#13. I love the art of acting, so I don't care if I'm in a movie with 10 people, two people, or by myself. I just really enjoy it.
Taraji P. Henson
#14. I'm not interested in being famous or anything, but I'm definitely interested in expressing emotions, and acting and filmmaking can be great outlets for that. Filmmaking is an incredible art.
Ellar Coltrane
#15. Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.
Mel Gibson
#16. I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.
Billy Magnussen
#17. I've always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn't until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting.
Sufe Bradshaw
#18. I was born first to music. But I went into acting because my father knew so much about music he intimidated me. So, I picked an art form, he knew nothing about. So I could be my own man.
Michael Moriarty
#19. Acting is an art form. If you are not creating something that's unusual and informative and at least has the possibility of being illuminating, then you are not into it as an art form.
Bruce Glover
#20. I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.
Antonio Banderas
#22. You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
#23. I go to universities to talk to the students and teach them how to watch movies. Movies have so many elements - acting, music, art direction, costumes. I also tell them not to watch pirated movies. At the cinema, they can enjoy the big screen and the surround sound.
Andrew Lau
#24. Sincerity and the correct use of the voice are the greatest things in the art of acting.
Alla Nazimova
#25. I just love the whole art form of acting, of being in front of a camera and playing different things. Not that I would ever say I'm the greatest actor in the world, but I am capable of playing different kinds of roles that emotionally I could get into.
Andrew Dice Clay
#26. I was born in a suburb outside of Philadelphia called Lower Merion. After taking many leaves of absence, I just received my BA from NYU in Art History. I initially gravitated towards singing. Acting sort of sprang out of that as a means to participate in musicals.
Gideon Glick
#27. I was going to school thinking I was going to do something entirely different, thought acting was just a hobby at that point, met Stanley Kubrick and was like, 'Whoa, this can be an art form, and you can really move people the way you do simply by acting.'
Vinessa Shaw
#28. The thing is', (Rufus) Stone said, 'that if you don't believe that you are an old man, or a woman, or a tramp, then how can you expect anyone else to believe you? Looking the part is just the surface; being the part is the true disguise.
Andy Lane
#29. Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.
Clint Eastwood
#30. For me acting is a passion and an art, and always will only be that. I don't have any rules when it comes to acting. I'll do anything. But it depends on the script. Either I'll have passion for the project or I won't. It's got to fuel me.
Shailene Woodley
#31. It's kind of funny, with all of the different outlets that come from acting that you could try, I would love to direct and kind of be involved in art direction, too.
Imogen Poots
#32. Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they're doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they're doing. There is a craft.
Meryl Streep
#34. Acting is a strange business; one day it's there, and the next day nowhere to be seen.
Ralph Richardson
#35. Prose is an art form, movies and acting in general are art forms, so is music, painting, graphics, sculpture, and so on. Some might even consider classic games like chess to be an art form. Video games use elements of all of these to create something new. Why wouldn't video games be an art form?
Sam Lake
#36. Acting is somewhat mysteriously taught. There are so many different methods and systems and processes for teaching acting because it will always be an elusive art-form.
Deborah Ann Woll
#37. Acting is like any other art form, in that you have the option to go very big or go very small.
Nicolas Cage
#38. I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous.
Gene Wilder
#39. I always distrust the word art when it is applied to acting.
Anthony Hopkins
#40. [Human beings] will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money.
Ernst Levy
#41. I love the art of acting, so whether I do it on film with a million people seeing me or I do it in front of 20 people in a class showcasing my art, I am going to act whether anyone sees it or everyone sees it.
Lauren London
#42. No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.
Carol Burnett
#43. Acting is not a lofty performance; it is simply the source of becoming and existing transparently. Acting, I find, is the art of frothing to the surface every raw and honest emotion. The moment an actor pretends, he loses his audience forever
Masiela Lusha
#44. The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.
Anthony Hopkins
#45. The remedy of disharmony is not in surrender but in understanding more about ones self & acting out of pure Will ... Desire 2 will; The art of transforming a desire into a formidable force of True Will
Dinesh Kumar
#46. A lot of actors on film sets ... very often they're not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I've always had that awareness and that's something that I've wanted to bring in to go beyond acting ... As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.
Andy Serkis
#47. I barely slept during high school because I was too busy dancing and acting all the time. The plan was to go to my dream college that had one of the best performing arts programs, and then go to LA to follow my dream of being an actress.
Rachele Brooke Smith
#48. I'm very passionate about art, music, drawing, acting, so I'd like to have the chance to get the larger choice regarding acting.
Berenice Marlohe
#49. As a teenager, I was really interested in drama and art. I did painting and drawing. I did some acting and loved theater.
Sarah Gavron
#50. This art of acting is a process I love very much. It's an unbelievably fulfilling experience for me and I look forward to building upon my art in the years to come.
Greg Akcelrod
#51. Twenty years earlier, in a life [Kirsten] mostly couldn't remember, she had had a small nonspeaking role in a short-lived Toronto production of King Lear. Now she walked in sandals whose soles had been cut from an automobile tire, three knives in her belt.
Emily St. John Mandel
#52. I have the opportunity to learn about the fashion world, and I appreciate it as an art form ... But I never want it to take over my acting.
Lupita Nyong'o
#53. I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
Alex Meraz
#54. Art is violent. To be decisive is violent ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.
Anne Bogart
#55. Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.
Ralph Richardson
#56. All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics.
Pete Seeger
#57. It is not the act of making art that is painful. It is the desire to make something and not acting on it that causes pain ... A day when I don't write is less happy. This is not discipline. It is affection, enthusiasm, adventure-any number of other words besides discipline.
Julia Cameron
#58. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.
Heston Blumenthal
#59. The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter.
Francois Delsarte
#60. At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.
Catherine Hicks
#61. Anything I learned about the fine art of acting I learned from Hugo.
Cleo Moore
#62. In my opinion, if you want to pursue an art, especially acting, you have to be really perceptive of what people go through. There is so much bad in the world, and I think that acting it out and exploring it almost helps you deal with it.
Rita Volk
#63. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#64. I didn't know I wanted to act until it was around 21. I had just come back to Los Angeles after two and half years of traveling and working as a dancer and singer and was looking for a new performing art to study. I started taking acting classes and fell in love.
Caity Lotz
#65. I wanted to emulate my parents - Mum captained India in basketball, and Dad won a bronze in hockey in 1972 Olympics. My focus has always been to achieve excellence whether in the field of tennis, in the corporate field, in the art of acting or in motivating youngsters.
Leander Paes
#66. Acting is something I love to do. I love to perform and I love the art, the craft of it.
Jill Bennett
#67. Acting to me is a very organic art form and you just go and do it. And I like to direct the same way that I like to be directed. Let me bring in what I want to bring in, and if something's wrong, just tell me about it and I'll make some corrections or adjustments. And that's what I do.
Clint Eastwood
#68. I keep it real normal, like I don't try to act like a celebrity, or say that just because I'm on a TV show I can do other types of TV. I take it very seriously and I respect the art of acting.
Vinny Guadagnino
#69. Acting for me is not a business, it's about trying to make pieces of art that I believe that I feel proud of. And it's the journey of that.
Nicole Kidman
#70. There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general ... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.
Haley Joel Osment
#71. If you focus on what you want and you persevere, chances are you succeed. You know, that's what I found. It might not be in acting - it might be in business, financing, it might be in the arts, it might be in anything. But it's all about focusing and being inspired.
Cory Monteith
#72. The highs, the lows, the peaks, the valleys, whatever, it's all going to go into the art, whether I'm singing or acting or whatever.
Jill Scott
#73. Acting is primarily is where I want to go. But seeing how the visual effects guys work, and the special effects guys and the art department guys, how they work and seeing their visions is really interesting. I don't think those guys get the recognition they deserve.
James Phelps
#74. Judging is acting on a limited knowledge. Learn the art of observing without evaluating.
Pushpa Rana
#75. Movie acting may not have a certain kind of glory as true art, but it is damn hard work.
William Holden
#76. I fell in love with the art of acting back when I was 10 years old, actually.
Sinqua Walls
#77. Acting is the art of speaking in a loud, clear voice and the avoidance of bumping into the furniture.
Alfred Lunt
#79. Great acting is as much about the choices a performer makes as it is about their ability.
Stewart Stafford
#80. People who are artists, they want their music, their art, their acting craft to get out. And once it's appreciated, that seems to be, unfortunately, enough. But you got to take care of your business, surround yourself with good counsel, and that didn't happen.
Michael Wright
#81. The art of acting presupposes three phases: understanding a part, intuiting a part, and contemplating the essence of a part.
Franz Grillparzer
#82. I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?
Camryn Manheim
#83. Whatever art--writing, painting, sculpture, acting, dance, music, or any other--there will be frustration & travails. It's all worth it
Mark Rubinstein
#84. I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.
Joe Wright
#85. I think the funny thing about acting for me - and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way - not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it's that important to me - is that it is an ancient healing art.
Melissa Leo
#86. I've never tried to learn the art of acting. I have been in the business for years but I still can't tell what acting is or how it's done.
Paul Muni
#87. Acting and making art is just something I love to do, and I love to tell stories that feel important, honest and necessary.
Zoe Kravitz
#88. Some people live, eat and breathe art, and they love acting and filmmaking. I've got other loves. I love animals. I love teaching. I love kids. That's always something in the back of my mind.
Kay Panabaker
#89. There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you'd like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they're not, is a lot.
Zoe Bell
#90. I tried acting and all of the arts, I even put out a record album, but what I like the most is business.
Beverly Johnson
#91. Watching my stepfather and mother working in the industry - acting and composing - and seeing firsthand how difficult it is to achieve a successful career in the theater, I thought it might be safer to go to art school with the aim of becoming a painter.
Juliet Rylance
#92. When I was younger, I had no interest. But after I went to Paris to see the collections for the first time a few years ago, they made a huge impression on me. I realized that fashion is an art form, like acting or painting.
Camilla Belle
#93. All great art comes from a sense of outrage.
Glenn Close
#94. I think that when I was child, acting was mostly just a hobby for me. It was something that my parents encouraged me to think of the way that my brothers thought of their cross-country classes, or my little sister to dance classes and art classes, and it was something like that for me.
Mara Wilson
#96. Then in college, besides economics, I also majored in studio art and got involved in photography and making short films and acting. But I didn't know you could make a living that way.
Brit Marling
#97. Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant.
Robert A. Heinlein
#98. Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
Ralph Richardson
#99. I have some friends who are actors. I've watched them work. And I would say that of all the arts, acting is the most grueling, thankless. Never apologize for your work.
Kristen Stewart
#100. I have a very broad-minded family. Acting is an art, and we understand that.
Esha Gupta
