Acting Out Quotes

#1. Everyone brings their own particular skill set to the job, and acting training can work for a lot of actors, and it can't. I've seen a lot of really good actors go into acting schools and then come out a little bit corrupted.

Xavier Samuel

#2. Having a chance to be someone other than yourself and to act out stuff that makes people look at you, like, wow, and that's why I love acting so much.

Quinton Aaron

#3. Acting is something that I always wanted, but I never paid attention to the notion that it might actually work out. You have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do - at one stage, I wanted to be a jockey - but this is the one that's a big deal.

Olivia Thirlby

#4. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

Bret Easton Ellis

#5. I say I'm not shy, but ... Acting is a very vulnerable experience, and you've got to be really confident to put yourself out there to be judged.

Shemar Moore

#6. As a rapper, you sort of act in music videos and in the persona you adopt onstage. You kinda have to put yourself out there and be courageous even to be a rapper. So, to step into acting was not that difficult a transition to make.

Queen Latifah

#7. I think acting for sure takes a lot of dedication, especially when you're starting out, because it's so much rejection and it's so important to really study and know your craft.

Bitsie Tulloch

#8. Acting is a win-win situation. There is no risk involved. That's why I get tired of hearing actors who try to make out that there's a downside to it. Fame is an odd thing. It bugs you a little bit, but it's really not bad.

John Corbett

#9. It all started in Michigan. My dad got a job in Michigan, so we all moved up there from St. Louis. I kind of hung out in the summer and had nothing to do, so I sort of got into acting. And then I was going to Grand Blanc High, doing the acting thing and hoping it would pan out.

Evan Peters

#10. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Laura Linney

#11. I never really wanted to grow up. I grew up really young. I moved out when I was 13 - that's when I started acting.

Helena Bonham Carter

#12. Ultimately, everyone is acting out of what they feel is the best choice. In a way, they're all trying to improve the world. And I think that those basic choices make the world a better place.

Chuck Palahniuk

#13. When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all - because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.

Eva Hoffman

#14. If acting doesn't work out, I plan to do food photography and just eat my way through the entire world. I'm a big foodie, and if I could make some career out of it, that would be fantastic.

Jamie Chung

#15. I came out to California to live with my mom in Orange County for a while, and then I came up to Hollywood. I had just turned nineteen. I took an acting class at Playhouse West and decided, 'Wow, I think I can do this!' I studied really hard for three years before I got an agent.

Jamie Anne Allman

#16. The actual time you're acting is miniscule compared to the time you're getting ready to do the work. The big difference on series television is, there's not a lot of hanging-out time. You're pumping those pages out, you're doing six, seven, eight pages a day. And I like that pace.

Joe Mantegna

#17. Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

Wallace Shawn

#18. Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.

Mahatma Gandhi

#19. When I came out to L. A., I got a part in an episode of 'Star Trek: Voyager,' and I hired an acting coach.

Sarah Silverman

#20. What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.

Katharine Hepburn

#21. I just love acting. Being in theater or being in television or film, I'm really living out my destiny.

Sufe Bradshaw

#22. I think acting has helped me come out of my shell because when I play a character, I can't be self-conscious.

Joan Cusack

#23. There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

Edward Norton

#24. I used to wait tables at Gladstone's, a seafood restaurant, day in and day out. I made some of my best friends there. I taught dance and acting lessons to kids. It was awesome - an outreach program, Voices Unheard. I was a messenger for a couple of months.

Sufe Bradshaw

#25. I could feel my body temperature - I knew I was bright red. It was so humiliating, I was so upset, and it was nothing I had planned to do. It was just one of those beautiful moments, the alchemy of acting that is so mysterious, where you sort of go, "How did that come out of me?"

Sarah Paulson

#26. I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.

Annette Bening

#27. I've been performing since I came out of the womb. I've been dancing and singing since I was a toddler. Acting seemed like a natural progression from that.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead

#28. When I got out of college, I booked a movie called 'Go for It!' with Lionsgate, came out here, and I've been acting ever since - or trying, constantly trying.

Gina Rodriguez

#29. Because I was crazy and because my parents wanted me out of their hair, they put me in an all-day acting class ... so they wouldn't have to deal with me, probably. And it just so happened there agents auditing the class, and I ended up getting signed.

Liana Liberato

#30. Acting is a child's prerogative. Children are born to act. Usually, people grow up and out of it. Actors always seem to me to be people who never quite did grow out of it.

Joanne Woodward

#31. In 1998, the acting roles suddenly bottomed out. I was no longer getting scripts; even my agent stopped calling. When I finally got him on the phone to ask him what was going on, he paused, then said: 'Well, Christine, you're 45.' I got rid of him.

Christine Ebersole

#32. I was 16 when I quit gymnastics and decided to start acting. I started booking immediately after. I was very lucky and fortunate, but I also did the hard work. Half of it's hard work and half of it's luck. It's been working out so far. Fingers crossed for the future.

Nina Dobrev

#33. I already love acting and I love actors, so being able to communicate with actors and to bring performances out of them, and to tell a story and aid them, is really exciting for me.

Eric Balfour

#34. Spiritual wisdom consists in finding out the subtleties, policies, and depths of any indwelling sin ... to trace this serpent in all its turnings and windings; be able to say, at its most secret actings, 'This is your old way and course; I know what you aim at.'

John Owen

#35. I still say I would love to go back to acting, but after my kids are older. You can't just drop everything and go out on a call and keep a stable life.

Suzanne Crough

#36. I've been in L.A., but I wasn't acting. I didn't know that I wanted to act, so I was in L.A. but working at a restaurant seven days a week and trying to figure out what I wanted to do and all that kind of stuff.

Mircea Monroe

#37. Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.

John Waters

#38. Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Richard Yates

#39. One of the difficulties of being a writer must be that you create drama that you can't live out. That's one of the wonderful things about acting.

Anjelica Huston

#40. I've worked with acting coaches, I've been going out on auditions and meeting with casting directors. But I'm not known as an actress.

Cassie Ventura

#41. Acting is easy and fun. You earn a lot of money, and you bang out with girls. The profession is given tremendous significance within our society, but it's not really worthy of it.

James Spader

#42. My background is really being a writer's actor - that seems to be the way I work best, bringing out the best of writing. There's a whole range of acting skills, and some people can be astonishing with very poor material. That's not me; my skill is essentially unlocking the writing.

Lindsay Duncan

#43. We don't think of them as acting, but we take on certain characteristics based on where we function, and those relationships draw out aspects of who we are as people. And that's what acting is. Different parts draw out different parts of your nature.

Peter Riegert

#44. You've got to be flexible. Directors do a massive amount of planning and homework, and if after all that your director decides to throw it all out of the window and shoot spontaneously, then you must follow his lead.

Michael Caine

#45. I need to decide whether to apply for college or delay it for a couple of years while I pursue some more acting projects. Right now I'm trying to sort things out, so I can make the right choices.

Lacey Chabert

#46. I think what I do in my acting world and what I do in my standup world is bring up a brand that I want to bring across. Once you figure out your brand and what you do, it's kind of easy at that. You end up getting your audience.

J. B. Smoove

#47. I started acting when I was 13 in New York. Worked there for a couple years, then auditioned for a show there that was going to be filming here. Ended up coming out, getting the job and just staying.

Kristanna Loken

#48. I don't love acting. How can you love something when you sit around 12 hours a day and work 10 minutes a day? I'm just doing it because it keeps me off the streets and out of jail.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

#49. I really started dreaming ... and broke out of my shyness when I got to Howard University. My first acting class was an Intro to Acting class with Professor Bay, who really broke me out of my shell, encouraged me to follow my dreams and make them a reality.

Lance Gross

#50. When I connect to my soul, project it into another # character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film
that has always been for me the great joy of # acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around.

Kyra Sedgwick

#51. The point was - he wasn't acting. It was as if he'd forgotten how! Jack still knew his lines, but he was out of character ... Jack had stopped acting. He was just Jack Burns - the real Jack Burns at last.

John Irving

#52. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I lived in Grand Blanc, Michigan for a year and that's when I got involved in acting and took classes there. A manager who saw me at the agency I was at in Michigan wanted me to come out to L.A.

Evan Peters

#53. I'm trying to get an acting gig on 'CSI' or something like that, so we'll see how that works out. I'm a singer, definitely not an actor, so I just follow directions.

Jason Aldean

#54. I'm getting out of acting.

John Corbett

#55. I find talking about acting very boring, having to come out with platitudes about how terribly nice everyone is. I would much rather just do it.

Penelope Wilton

#56. Quotes are a way of acting out not just a text, and not just thinking, but the making of a text. The construction of thinking.

Masha Tupitsyn

#57. You don't want to say somebody did a great job of acting. You want to say, "Where did he find that person? How did he get that factory worker to come out of the factory and be on camera?" You want to believe that person is real.

Ronee Blakley

#58. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.

Christina Westover

#59. Yes, she doesn't really look like either of us, does she? Perhaps she's a girl who's fallen madly in love with me and persists in following me wherever I go."
"My talent is shape-shifting, Will, not acting," said Tessa, and at that Jem laughed out loud.

Cassandra Clare

#60. 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

#61. When I came into the industry I started with acting and I did drama during junior high and high school. I fell into dancing as a hobby, but whenever you need work, you try out different things. So I booked a lot of jobs for dancing and it kept rolling and rolling.

Harry Shum Jr.

#62. Everything I do and say tells a story of who I am serving. If I am acting out of anger and spite, I am serving the father of darkness and spreading his darkness. If I am honoring to the Lord with my actions, I am serving to further the name of Jesus and spreading His light.

Lysa TerKeurst

#63. Acting is a life experience. I'm always learning things when I'm making a movie. So the fame part of it is fine when you consider what you get out of this job.

Kate Bosworth

#64. More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.

David Blankenhorn

#65. I think with acting, since I became an actor ... I, as a person, have become more confident and I have really come out of my shell somewhat ... and back to myself, you know.

Charlie Bewley

#66. Maybe if I completely shaved my head and get the frost out of my moustache, maybe I could get one of those serious acting jobs.

Laila Ali

#67. Until I came out, my acting was all about disguise, and thereafter it became about telling the truth.

Ian McKellen

#68. After going to theater school, and then subsequently dropping out, I would say that when I first went to Chicago and learned long-form improv, that was a far better acting workshop than any acting school I've been to.

Thomas Middleditch

#69. I've been in the studio experimenting on making a CD of my own. I'm trying out different producers, styles, sounds. With music, as opposed to acting, you are not playing a character. You are showing people who you are. I really want to have my spirit in it.

Emmy Rossum

#70. I started acting long before I decided to pursue it. I started acting as an amateur when I was a kid, but I wanted to become a diplomat. It was self-centered and weird, but I had this idea of going out in the world and solving conflicts and making the world a better place.

Stellan Skarsgard

#71. Kids really take you out of yourself, and your priorities become really clear. With acting and the business, you don't really have priorities. You have no idea what each day or week's going to be like.

Josie Bissett

#72. I drifted into acting and drifted out. Acting is not everything. Living is.

Irene Dunne

#73. What you learn in any acting class is how to make a fool of yourself and enjoy things and get out of your head.

Aya Cash

#74. If the acting don't work out, I'll have a future in construction.

Anthony Mackie

#75. You know, a lot of actors I think go into acting for therapy from whatever trauma has affected them as children. But for me, I think I sought out the drama. That's why I like doing what I do.

Michael Ealy

#76. I dropped out of school and I never took acting classes.

Alice Englert

#77. Making a living out of acting sounded like science-fiction when I was growing up. I didn't know anyone around me who lived from anything related to art.

Penelope Cruz

#78. We all are actors. The moment we step out of our comfort zones, the moment we are interacting with another, the actor in us comes alive.

Ama H. Vanniarachchy

#79. My first paid job was delivering newspapers. The first paid acting job I got was dressing up as Edam cheese and handing out leaflets on London's Oxford Street. I got pushed over by these little herberts and given a good shoe-in.

Jason Flemyng

#80. I went to a dentist for a toothache, and it turned out his kids were in an acting school. We talked about it, and I decided to enroll at the same school. I was 14. I guess you could say I just got lucky.

Nolan Gerard Funk

#81. I never wanted to lose out on an acting job and wonder if I hadn't been trained enough.

David Alan Grier

#82. I don't think a man has to go around shouting and play-acting to prove he is something. And a real man don't go around putting other guys down, trampling their feelings in the dirt, making out they're nothing.

Joe Frazier

#83. I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

Edward Norton

#84. When I first moved out to Los Angeles I was thinking, you know, I wanted to be an actor but I didn't really know what acting was about. I thought if I could be a model, or even do commercials and stuff like that for the rest of my life, I'd be happy.

Michael Biehn

#85. I'm looking forward to playing some really despicable characters at some point in my career so I can branch out and stretch those acting muscles. But I wouldn't want to do that on a regular basis.

Zachary Levi

#86. Georgia was a great place to live, but I wanted to get out because I knew the opportunities for what I was doing - stand-up comedy and eventually acting - were in Los Angeles.

Chris Tucker

#87. In dreams we see ourselves naked and acting out our real characters, even more clearly than we see others awake.

Henry David Thoreau

#88. The Irish Catholic side was married to the life of an actor and I found out acting could be a form of prayer.

Liam Neeson

#89. It feels like as you get a bit older, you've worked out the things that are good for your life apart from with acting.

Dolly Wells

#90. The 'Weston' is actually my middle name. I hyphenated it because I really wasn't willing to go out in the acting world as 'Tom Jones,' 'cause I'm Welsh as well, so the connotation is just ridiculous.

Tom Weston-Jones

#91. When I started studying acting in New York, I didn't plan to be an action hero. I just wanted to learn acting because I felt it was something I needed to try to do for myself, to express something, my inner pain, or something I couldn't get out.

Dolph Lundgren

#92. And maybe now it's about telling the occasional story that I recently believe in and think would be good to put out there into the world. But I look back, that crying taught me how to approach everything in life. Acting or Otherwise.

Drew Barrymore

#93. Acting is a cruel enough business. One minute everyone's going 'Hey!' and the next they're going 'Who?'. You certainly don't need people knowing your private business, especially if you want to come out with your head still attached.

Jack Davenport

#94. In my opinion, animation is best when it communicates without words, because it is the perfect medium through which to make shortcuts to meaning. When actors are not talking, just acting out, it looks kind of weird. But in animation, mime is constant, and you accept it.

Signe Baumane

#95. My favorite way of getting out of doing chores is by acting like I'm asleep. But it never works.

Devon Werkheiser

#96. I could describe my career in two words: who knew. I was on the path to becoming a professional baseball player, but I got injured in college. When I decided to move out to L.A. to try acting, nobody was betting on me, not even my family. But it's always been that way for me; nothing has come easy.

Shemar Moore

#97. If I had any advice for my 16-year-old self, it would just be to stay strong, because acting is not an easy lifestyle, especially when you are starting out. That being said, it definitely makes it all worth it when it does happen.

Melissa Benoist

#98. In acting, you are fulfilled if you give justice to your role ... if you are able to do a credible performance and touch the audience. Same with directing. If you are able to draw out the best from your actors, then you fulfill your job as a director.

Timothy Hutton

#99. I like to read. I go to movies quite a bit. I often go to see friends in theater productions. I hike, stretch and work out. I like to sing. I love going back to acting class and working on new material.

Juliet Landau

#100. After I graduated high school and came out to do 'Buffy,' I was enrolled at my mom's university, and I was going to go get a real job. I never thought of acting and never really wanted to be an actor.

Eliza Dushku