Meisner Acting Quotes

#1. It is the entire euro zone system which is under threat at the moment, not just a few small countries anymore ... Our euro is under threat. The changing situation needs a quick and immediate reaction.

Iveta Radicova

#2. Acting is not talking, it's living off the other fellow!!!

Sanford Meisner

#3. The truth of ourselves is the root of our acting.

Sanford Meisner

#4. The greatest piece of acting or music or sculpture or what-have-you always has its roots in the truth of human emotion.

Sanford Meisner

#5. Suffering is my teacher. If I pay attention to it instead of trying to numb it out, maybe it can lead me to its root.

Michelle Colston

#6. An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

Kevin Kelly

#7. Every little moment has a meaning all its own.

Sanford Meisner

#8. Acting can be fun. Don't let it get around.

Sanford Meisner

#9. An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.

Sanford Meisner

#10. Transfer the point of concentration to some object outside of yourself - another person, a puzzle, a broken plate that you are gluing.

Sanford Meisner

#11. Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.

Sanford Meisner

#12. Act before you think - your instincts are more honest than your thoughts.

Sanford Meisner

#13. The text is your greatest enemy.

Sanford Meisner

#14. Acting in a scene is like paddling a canoe from a pebbly beach on to the river, the writer builds the canoe, and the actor provides the river. The river is the actor's thoughts and emotions.

Sanford Meisner

#15. I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

Robert Duvall

#16. Las Vegas, Nevada: A city where oddities don't make you lame, But instead bring you riches and fortune and fame.

Walter Wykes

#17. Acting is fun ... don't let that get around!

Sanford Meisner

#18. There was only one elective at my college for acting, but thank God for that elective because we had a great teacher who introduced me to the Meisner technique for acting. Once I read that book, I said, 'Wow, if I could do that and have that honest moment on stage, that would be amazing.'

Nestor Carbonell

#19. If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don't have it don't bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can't fake emotion.

Sanford Meisner

#20. The only way to deal with yourself as an actor is to follow the emotional truth of what you have to do under the imaginary circumstances. And as you develop you become confident. You come to believe in what you're doing and trust it because it's out of you.

Sanford Meisner

#21. Some things are sent to test us. Clearly you must be good at problem solving if you are being set tough exams.

Jan Hellriegel

#22. I went to theater school, and if I spent time with one school of thought in this whole acting game, it's the Meisner approach of improvise-based acting. This does not mean that you improvise your acting, but that you focus on the other person.

Mackenzie Davis

#23. Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

Sanford Meisner

#24. Find in yourself those human things which are universal.

Sanford Meisner

#25. The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work.

Steven Pinker

#26. Acting is the ability to live truthfully under the given imaginary circumstances

Sanford Meisner

#27. I've always hankered after going into space and walking on the moon and Mars. I did want to be an astronaut, and had there been a manned space flight programme in the U.K., I would have been knocking on the door.

David Mackay

#28. The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.

Sanford Meisner

#29. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

Simon Schama

#30. At home, I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help. It stirred, delighted, and tormented me.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky