Top 100 Acting Up Quotes
#2. I wanted to tell people, "My depression is acting up today" as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.
Ned Vizzini
#3. Why stash little ones away in a nursery downstairs with volunteers, who are hard to recruit and who themselves then miss the service, when they can actually be part of God's people in worship? This can make it hard sometimes when children are acting up. But it keeps families together.
Christian Smith
#4. I was studying to be an architect, I wasn't plotting to join the movies. Films were just another career option. I took acting up with the same schoolgirl enthusiasm I had for examinations. Acting is a job and I take it very seriously.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
#5. Yes, my buggy is outside and my horse has been acting up. I wondered if you could come rub its skull and tell me if it's got a bad case of stubborn, or if it might be indigestion?
Regina Jennings
#6. Knowing your responsibilities doesn't make you mature but acting up on it does.
Caroline De Leon
#7. Mr. Blank's old friend is acting up again, and because our hero is no longer wearing the cotton trousers and underpants and is quite naked under the pajama bottoms, there is no barrier to prevent Mr. Bigshot from bounding out through the slit and poking his head into the light of day.
Paul Auster
#8. I'll be damned. Miranda Sweet, is it you or is my glaucoma acting up again?" Ruby Sue sat her glass down on the Formica countertop with a clank. "You always did know how to make an entrance. Who do you think you are, the Queen of England?
Avery Flynn
#9. You're worried about her forgiving you...but you need to be worrying about why you're acting up in the first place.
Angela Flournoy
#10. People find it hard to get their heads around nominating a computer-generated character, but every time you see Gollum on the screen, that's me who is acting up there - even if it is behind a mass of pixels - and it's my voice you hear.
Andy Serkis
#11. Acting is such a bizarre way of life. Unless you're really passionate about it, you should give it up. Don't beat yourself up.
Stockard Channing
#12. Don't stink up the place with bad acting, if an opportunity comes your way.
Edie McClurg
#13. I took an acting class. After the first day, the teacher quit, so they said take another. When I saw 'How to be a Stand-up Comedian,' it resonated. I realized I'd rather make 200 people laugh than make one person cry.
Wendy Liebman
#14. I'm trying to think how I impressed my wife. We had an on-stage kiss, and I really went for it. Because I liked her. Usually you can get away with it being just technical, but it was a problem when I ended up kissing my wife on the set. I'd say I stopped acting and kissed her on set.
David Walton
#15. 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
#16. I never imagined I'd go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven.
Lesley Nicol
#17. I was really shy when I was younger, so my mom got me into an acting class to see if I would open myself up more in front of an audience. Her plan was for me to just talk more.
Moises Arias
#18. I'm getting positive feedback for my acting so we'll see if any other interesting parts come up.
Johnny Vegas
#19. 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
#20. I suppose, when you start up in acting, you hope to be given challenges, and you always have dreams about the things you could do and couldn't do, but normally we get pigeon-holed a little bit, as we go on in our careers.
John Noble
#21. Growing up, I always had two interests and two passions; one being public service and the other being the arts and acting.
Kal Penn
#22. Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.
Dustin Hoffman
#23. My mom is actually a former prima ballerina, and all the women in my family are associated either with dance or choreography or acting, so I'm very lucky in a way because I grew up in a family of artists. I've been dancing since I was a little kid.
Ksenia Solo
#24. Growing up, I loved magic, I loved acting, I loved comedy. I really didn't know what direction I was going. I was trying a whole bunch of stuff.
Michael Carbonaro
#25. We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
Viola Davis
#26. I moved from acting to stand-up because castings are just about what you look like. It doesn't matter if you can act or not. In comedy, no one cares what you look like.
Mark Billingham
#27. I love to work. I really enjoy getting up really early and driving downtown. I just really love the process of acting and being on a series.
Portia De Rossi
#28. 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
#29. Yet Tanneman was a man grown up to danger and trouble, knowing nothing else, and for the first time he was acting with conscious, deliberate purpose.
Louis L'Amour
#30. It wasn't right to have someone charge into you your world without even asking, acting as if you were nothing more than an egg to be flipped and flopped, sunny-side up or scrambled, depending on the whims on whoever ran your life ... _
Alice Hoffman
#31. Acting-wise, I did a web series. I play a music agent in a series called 'Keeping Up with the Downs.'
James Michael Tyler
#32. I love acting. Acting's always been my first love. I grew up watching multi-camera television shows ... And I thought I would absolutely be in for that.
Seth Green
#33. Begin within. If it shows up in your life, it's coming to tell you something about you that you're acting like you don't know. Something about yourself, or your relationship with God.
Iyanla Vanzant
#34. I've always had to bind up and wrestle fear, because acting is really about faith. And faith and fear can't really stay in the same room. So, in order for you to be more than a conqueror, you're going to have to defeat fear with faith.
Derek Luke
#35. A good change leader never thinks, "Why are these people acting so badly? They must be bad people." A change leader thinks, "How can I set up a situation that brings out the good in these people?
Chip Heath
#36. I like finding stuff that I suck at and trying to get better. So I'm taking classes, getting myself comfortable in an acting scene. You've got to work out those ticks. For instance, standing up used to be really hard for me. I act much better if I'm sitting down.
Bill Burr
#37. When you have only a single dream it is more than likely to come true - because you keep working toward it without getting mixed up.
Marilyn Monroe
#38. I've been acting since I was 8 - I used to play hockey and there was a kids' theatre down the street from my house and one day I just walked in and signed up for auditions for 'The Wizard Of Oz.'
Nico Tortorella
#39. I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.
Ian McKellen
#40. When you do improv, you're everything. You're a performer, writer, and director, because you're moving the scene in the direction you want it to go, you're making it up as you go, and you're acting it.
Rob Reiner
#41. It's interesting how you can blur the line between acting and living and learn from your performances. I'm just trying to keep learning as much as I can and not get caught up in all the distractions that can play havoc with your mind.
Kristen Stewart
#42. I'm one of a generation brought up on television whose acting is more 'naturalistic', whereas with some of the older generation it's more heightened. But I think there's room for both styles.
David Oyelowo
#43. When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know ... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out,and I'm just writing it down.
M.J. Rose
#44. Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.
Tana French
#45. New Rule: President Bush must stop acting like WE'RE the idiots. He gives speech after speech, and the theme is always the same; 'What part of freedom don't you get, you morons?'. I'll answer that for you Mr. President. The part where you give it to people by blowing them up.
Bill Maher
#46. Once I started doing stand-up, everything fell into place. That was when I started acting more; I felt like I'd found my place in the business.
Chris D'Elia
#47. I'm a better actor now than I ever was, I wish I could have hurried that up, but there's no way. Anyway, I always wanted to be around for a long time. Like a European actor, I hope I live a long time and that I'm acting until I finish.
Christopher Walken
#48. My role as Ewan McGregor's girlfriend in the film 'Incendiary' ended up on the cutting-room floor, but at least I had two brilliant days of acting with Ewan.
Natalie Dormer
#49. One of the most precious parts of acting is the work before you show up on the set, the time you spend being with your character before you bring that character to life. To me, that's the most rewarding part of it all. It feels very good to show up on a set just knowing that's with you.
Zoe McLellan
#50. I was working at Kentucky Fried Chicken when my math teacher said, "You're failing in school, you're messing up, why don't you just try this?" I said, "Alright, let me try it," and I started going to acting classes and I loved it. I thought, "I may not make it but I love doing it."
John Leguizamo
#51. I love acting and certainly won't give it up, but it's part of a bigger canvas for me now.
Andy Serkis
#52. I'd been acting and doing stand-up in New York about eight years, getting rejected, and I finally got the opportunity to do stand-up on Letterman, which holds even more importance for me. With comedians, that's definitely the pinnacle, but being from Indiana, it was a big to-do.
Jim Gaffigan
#53. Well, I've been a professional racer for nine years. And if I could get it to pay me as much as acting, I'd give up all the rest in a second. Working in television, however, has made me accustomed to a certain lifestyle that I'd like to maintain.
Jason Priestley
#54. I always feel like a doctor who loses a patient on the operating table or something where I felt just devastated and I beat myself up until I get to try it the next night and "I'll get it better tonight." So I'm hard on myself. I think I'm not alone in that regard with acting.
Allison Janney
#55. I'm not one of those people who's saying "I'm going to set up a production company", because I like acting and not having to be a business man and do that side of things.
Nicholas Hoult
#56. Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them.
Curtis Grant
#57. I'd always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, 'You know, you'll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,' and that kinda sold it.
Matt Frewer
#58. I love nothing better than to get all the nuts and bolts out of the way - show up on time, with lines learned, clear on what the director expects of me, with my buttons buttoned and my jewelry on correctly - and then I completely commit to play acting.
Jane Elliot
#59. That's one of my little expressions. I never really studied acting so I kind of kiddingly talk about "building your circle" and "mooding up," because I really didn't learn any technique.
Susan Sarandon
#60. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
Daphne Du Maurier
#61. Anything that opens you up emotionally is going to impact your acting. Parenthood, becoming a mom, certainly does that.
Keri Russell
#62. I object!
What?
Bugger, was that acting?
Is not courtroom, Katya.
Shut up! I'm not good at having two conversations at once. And I hate Scott's plan!
You mean you "object" to it.
Joss Whedon
#63. I started out pursuing an acting career out of college when I lived in Los Angeles. When I got an entry into broadcasting, I preferred it. I liked being me, rather than dressing up to be someone else. Now I'm 30 and doing a career of my own and have been in this career for eight years.
Eleanor Mondale
#64. What I've learned about acting is that it needs to be mysterious. If you overthink how a beat needs to be played, it can trip you up.
Kate Winslet
#65. A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well.
Jello Biafra
#66. As a kid, I was always very shy growing up - I wasn't very good at articulating my thoughts or my feelings. Now that I'm older, I found acting to do that. So it's been an amazing way to sort of express who I am.
Colin Egglesfield
#67. Sitting at the table during Color Purple and looking up and suddenly realizing I was acting in front of Steven Spielberg, was pretty cool. It was pretty good.
Whoopi Goldberg
#68. If I had to give up either acting or dancing, I'd choose to keep dancing.
Cyd Charisse
#69. Acting has been the only thing so far that really gets me jazzed. It's like my girlfriend in a lot of ways. We fight. We have a relationship, and she gets me up every morning. I'm inspired by it, and I want to one day be really good at it and see what we can do together.
Eddie Cahill
#70. I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.
Kerry Washington
#71. You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.
Gene Wolfe
#72. It [love about acting] is all about role playing - the same thing you do when you're a kid, when you play with dolls or toys and make up stories. I never grew out of it.
Morgan Freeman
#73. When you have the feeling that anything's possible, sometimes you wind up acting on it.
James Cameron
#74. We were over in Europe all the time their posters were up. That's why I liked them. So now all of a sudden they're going to get a band hat on, and say people aren't acting the right way?
Kim Deal
#75. Since Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and I got together, I've cut back dramatically. My priorities changed, and I still love acting and all that, but not as much as I love watching my two kids grow up.
Michael Douglas
#76. This feels natural, Kit and I acting on something that was already there. My eyes roll back in my head as he slides inside of me. And then I wake up.
Tarryn Fisher
#77. I did grow up in Los Angeles. I actually didn't start acting until I was sixteen, so I was very removed from the Hollywood scene. I had always been in my school plays, but my mom and dad wanted to keep me out of the business until I was old enough to know who I was and not let anyone change me.
Halston Sage
#79. My first real acting gig was probably playing Mamillius in my mother's 'Winter's Tale.' My mom and dad are both in theater, so I grew up acting and being a little theater brat as well.
Logan Marshall-Green
#80. Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.
Patton Oswalt
#81. All sin has its being and origin in the fact that man wants to be his own judge. And in wanting to be that, and thinking and acting accordingly, he and his whole world is in conflict with God. It is an unreconciled world, and therefore a suffering world, a world given up to destruction.
Karl Barth
#82. I couldn't pick up a sword and go fight anyone, let me put it that way. It's choreography and it's acting. The best sword fights you see look amazing, but it's the acting that sells it more than anything.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
#83. The whole idea with acting is that you take some risks. And if you take some risks, you're really going to mess up sometimes. But it's not OK to mess up a movie; it's not OK to do that just so you can improve as an actor. But film-making takes a little bit of risk in every department.
Domhnall Gleeson
#84. When everyone around you is doing all this incredible pirate acting and you're having to sort of play the straight guy and move the story forward, you kind of want to be doing some of that pirate ripping it up stuff, but in truth, to be a part of that project is what I love.
Orlando Bloom
#85. Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.
Tod Machover
#86. Certain people are like 'Oh, here come the Feminazis!' You end up acting 10 times nicer than you even need to be, to be the opposite of the stereotype like 'You're the man haters!' We're always bending over backwards being extra nice. And I don't know if being nice is my legacy.
Kathleen Hanna
#87. I'm a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I'm ninety, and they won't need to paste my face with make-up.
Barbara Stanwyck
#88. I actually wanted to be a police officer like my dad for the longest time, up until my sophomore year in high school when I started doing plays. I did plays when I was little, but in high school, I started getting into acting.
Chad Lindberg
#89. I never grew up thinking I wanted to be a quote-unquote star or anything. My thing was just feeling blessed to be able to make my living acting.
Ving Rhames
#90. I think I've grown up in an era where character acting on film has become less desirable for the producers and directors and therefore the audience. They have got used to the people that those actors really are.
David Suchet
#91. I would rather give up acting than become world famous, because I think you pay a very high price. Writing and putting new plays out into the world has informed what I do, and I've had a lot more freedom to play really interesting parts.
Lindsay Duncan
#92. I love improv-ing, you know, from very early on when I started acting the school that I went to and everything was very big on ad-libbing and improv-ing and messing things up, so I feel very comfortable doing stuff like that.
Jennifer Lopez
#93. Saying yes means getting up and acting on your belief that you can create meaning and purpose in whatever life hands you.
Susan Jeffers
#94. I would say that 'Shake It Up' was a chance for me to do two things I really love: acting and dancing.
Zendaya
#95. I enjoyed acting at school and went to an acting workshop for kids in Nottingham. It was twice a week after school and free to go to - ITV subsidised it. Every now and again, a casting director would turn up. 'Peak Practice' became a rite of passage for us. It was the first job I had.
Joe Dempsie
#96. I acted in high school and studied at the British American Drama Academy in Oxford for one summer. I minored in theater, and I was always acting growing up, but really, I was just more interested in the comedy of it all.
T. J. Miller
#97. I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.
Larry Buchanan
#98. You don't psych yourself up for these things, you do them ... I'm acting for the audience, not for myself, and I do it as directly as I can.
James Cagney
#99. When I'm not acting, I try to be normal, play golf, play hockey. It's funny because you're in this little bubble when you're working - you don't read books, you don't really keep up with the news, you're just living that life.
Taylor Kitsch
#100. I was born and raised in Queens and moved into the city as a young adult. Then I ended up acting and decided to run off to California.
Debi Mazar
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