Top 100 Actors Stage Quotes
#1. I come from the stage. I started my career as a stand-up comedian and then later on became an actor.
Patrick Huard
#2. The world of chemical reactions is like a stage, on which scene after scene is ceaselessly played. The actors on it are the elements.
Clemens Winkler
#3. I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.
Fernando Pessoa
#4. In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
Quentin Crisp
#5. Many people with a wild desire to act prove failures on the stage, their inclinations are greater than their powers. Rarely is it the other way ...
Alec-Tweedie
#6. My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfillment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.
Peter O'Toole
#7. I found that golf saved me from going to the pub every day, so instead, I play golf with other unemployed actors. I'm a member of the Stage Golfing Society, and I play golf with all sorts of people.
Phil Daniels
#8. One thing he'd learned in ten years on the New York Stage was this: don't make friends with the man who plays Hamlet; make friends with the man who pays Hamlet.
Thomas Dyja
#9. Stage actors look down on movie actors, movie actors look down on TV actors, and TV actors look down on ... mass murderers ...
George Clooney
#10. On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.
Karl Kraus
#11. Most actors are either a shower of bloody scruffs or think they should dress like Hamlet off stage.
Martin Freeman
#12. It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings we cannot always analyse.
Constantin Stanislavski
#13. We were all actors, just as you are all actors now. But our audience wasn't as large as yours. And our performances, like those on a stage, were fleeting, uncaptured.
David Levithan
#14. There's always an intellectual side to the films Ang Lee's doing and to the characters, and there's such a deep knowledge when you've worked with the actors that he's worked with, on stage in particular, but also in film.
Jake Gyllenhaal
#15. When the drama of history is over, Jesus Christ will stand alone on the stage. All the great figures of history ... will realize that they have been but actors in a drama produced by another.
Helmut Thielicke
#16. There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead.
Robert Edmond Jones
#17. I've been on the stage my entire life as an actor.
Jeremy Piven
#18. On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.
Shirley Maclaine
#19. Acting is not as difficult as you may think. People are born natural actors
and play many parts on the stage of life. Everyone is constantly in front of an
audience - or performing monologues when alone.
Bryan Michael Stoller
#20. The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.
Thomas Heywood
#21. I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
Neil Simon
#22. This power that I'm supposed to have over women was never noticed when I was a stage actor on Broadway. I don't know when I got it. And by God, I can't explain it.
Clark Gable
#23. I've always known actors because my parents are actors on stage and so I lived in a very creative environment when I was a kid. All my life.
Marion Cotillard
#24. The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
Joseph Weizenbaum
#25. I love Back Stage. I have lots of theater friends and actors who depend on Back Stage.
Anurag Kashyap
#26. I find the theatre faintly embarrassing for the actors performing on stage. It seems rather showy-off in an undignified way.
Charles Saatchi
#27. There's a reason why actors are always dying to work with the Coens. They just set the stage for you to do their best work.
Oscar Isaac
#28. In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost.
James Carver
#29. Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
Charlie Chaplin
#30. I wanted to be a stage actress. I wanted to be a New York actress and have a community with other actors. I didn't want to get famous; I always thought getting famous was a drag on you.
Lily Tomlin
#32. You can always pick out stage actors at the Oscars: they know how to walk.
Ian McKellen
#33. I went to college and stage school, and thought about acting, but ... I just don't like actors very much! They're not as fun as musicians.
Martha Wainwright
#34. In politics, it's very theatrical. There's a lot of stage craft. The campaign is trying to tell a story that they want people to believe in, and candidates are playing the role, like actors, by a creative personae that people will be attracted to.
Beau Willimon
#35. Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.
Ninon De L'Enclos
#36. They are like actors playing a role, sometimes enjoying their role on stage, but usually relieved to leave it
Kelley Armstrong
#37. I like to think of myself as some of the Scotch tape that holds things together - I'm very handy to have around. But all that actors really need is a bare stage. Lighting is just one of the luxuries of the theater.
Jean Rosenthal
#38. The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.
Ethel Barrymore
#39. I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
M. Night Shyamalan
#40. On stage I am the actor, director and the bouncer all at the same time. Fear does not exist in this dojo does it? No Sensi! Sorry when I get excited I have to toss in some Karate Kid quotes.
Dane Cook
#41. When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.
Andy Serkis
#42. I don't like the theatre. I like plays in which the audience is addressed by the actors. I don't like seeing people talking to each other on stage as if there isn't an audience.
Jonathan Meades
#43. My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it's invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.
Yul Vazquez
#44. All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
Gene Wolfe
#46. That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage. I think the stage is an actor's place because actors, it belongs to you.
Lauren Bacall
#47. When actors encounter a mishap during a stage performance,
they transform it for good purpose by employing a technique called,
"use the difficulty." How can you "use the difficulty" in your life?
Gina Greenlee
#48. A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
Colin Wilson
#49. What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?
Joyce Cary
#50. The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself.
Michael Chekhov
#51. It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.
Jack Nicholson
#52. Regardless of what comes and goes on the stage, the stage is always just there. The people of the world are all actors, but if they own the stage, they become the masters. As masters, they will always be able to act on the stage.
Woo Myung
#53. It is so rare as an actor to be allowed the chance to revisit a role and to go back to a character that you already built, and lived inside, and understood. To take it further to another stage is a huge privilege.
Tom Hiddleston
#54. The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.
Trey Parker
#56. It's easier to be more vulnerable in a smaller environment. It's hard to expect your actors to be able to open up in that way and stay with the level of focus needed when there's so many people on stage.
Sadie Calvano
#57. I love stage actors. There's something special about all people who have to do a performance eight shows a week, and musical people, especially, are so much fun.
Kelly Bishop
#58. The staff, stage managers, ushers all behaved as if they respected the actors.
Estelle Parsons
#59. When real actors are approaching their work, we could be on a little stage somewhere, doing community theater. It's all the same. They're just trying to make the scene work. They're just trying to do the best they can and figure it out.
Kurt Fuller
#60. Once, and only once, I walked on stage and my mind went utterly blank! I had no idea why I was there! My fellow actors had to rescue me. I was very young and new to the business, so I'm glad it didn't give me stage fright for the rest of my life!
Laura Donnelly
#61. It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.
Aaron Tveit
#62. I love the Warner Brothers lot. There is so much history there. They've done such a smart thing. They have signs outside of each stage which tell you what movies and TV shows were shot inside. So cool ... you can almost feel the ghosts of actors past.
Valerie Azlynn
#63. People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.
Soren Kierkegaard
#64. If you're an actor, a real actor, you've got to be on the stage. But you mustn't go on the stage unless it's absolutely the only thing you can do.
Edith Evans
#65. There are so many stage actors on TV but you wouldn't know they were stage actors. And film and TV actors are going to the stage as well, so the crossover is great now.
Matthew Morrison
#66. He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.
He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.
He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
Ray Bradbury
#67. Excellence in life, is like a play. For your real life play, the quality of the actors you bring on your life's stage, determine your success. Always choose the best, most excellent actors.
Mark LaMoure
#68. I always think the great parts outlive the actors that play them and that's a stage tradition, that goes back hundreds of years and it should be that way.
Hugh Jackman
#69. For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do.
Jeremy Piven
#70. As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'
Daniel Day-Lewis
#71. That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there
and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.
Karl Kraus
#72. If you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you're given a free chance to practice your craft.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#73. I also sort of find the idea that not only do actors want to please when they're onstage, I find actors really want to please off stage a lot of the time, don't they?
Jeffrey Combs
#74. The advice that I usually give to young actors is that if you can create a character for the stage and keep that character fresh for at least 6 months that means you're doing the show eight times a week.
Joe Morton
#75. Do you believe that our stories were written from before that we are but actors performing on the stage called life with neither rehearsals nor retakes, the dialogues of our own and a fleeting audience or are you someone who pens down his own story?
Chirag Tulsiani
#76. He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.
John Le Carre
#77. Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.
David McCullough
#78. I was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.
Alex O'Loughlin
#79. When we talk about climate, we need to do everything we can to set the stage before the actors come on. And they may only have one chance at success. We should keep thinking: How do we maximize that chance of success?
David Titley
#80. Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?
Desiderius Erasmus
#81. We were on stage. We were supposed to speak our dialogues. But at times, a smile says more than words ever can!
Avijeet Das
#82. I played a role. That is what actors do. But I played it too well. I went too far. And by the time I wanted to stop, to take a bow and leave the stage, it was too late.
Jennifer Donnelly
#83. The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.
Patti LuPone
#84. Well, Mom and Dad are both actors, and I've spent a lot of time watching my mom on stage and a lot of time on set with my dad, so it was very much a part of my growing up.
Eleanor Tomlinson
#85. Sony could have $50 million and a sound stage and A-list actors and never make the same film. The constraints on this film became the essence of this film, became the power of this film.
Joshua Leonard
#86. I never had any classes or went to theatre school like a lot of actors, so all of my training has been on stage with different directors. That was a pretty good school room.
James Denton
#87. The first time I had got an offer to come to Hollywood, I turned it down. I said, 'No, I'm an actor of the stage.'
Kirk Douglas
#88. The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
H.L. Mencken
#89. Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
Anne Rice
#90. There are a lot of actors - I'm probably one - who are most at home when they're on stage.
Ian McKellen
#91. The actor doesn't merely command the stage, he seems to own it by divine right.
Frank Rich
#92. Britain produces great actors because they learn on stage so know their stuff when they get on a movie set.
Jerry Weintraub
#93. The actor must be full of passion. If he's too cool he's better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.
Stella Adler
#94. Working for Disney for the last eight and a half years, people come and go - production staff and actors. I stepped onto the sound stage and it was a literal time warp.
Jacob Young
#95. From a very young age, I wanted to get up on stage whenever I went to the theatre - the actors just seemed to be having so much fun. One of my worries about theatre, in fact, is that the actors are quite often having more fun than the audience.
Olivia Williams
#96. I would like to be able to be both a film actor and a stage actor - to be an American actor in the style of a lot the English actors who do films. They are these wonderful actors who can do everything.
John Glover
#97. I could not separate myself off stage from myself on stage, as so many actors can.
Kate Smith
#98. When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.
Jules Feiffer
#99. 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
#100. I'm a Navy brat. You find that a lot of stage actors are Army or Navy brats, because they have the ability to make a big impression, make friends, and then leave just a few months later.
John Michael Higgins
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