Meisner's Quotes

#1. I'm formally trained, I don't know what classically trained really means. I've worked with Sanford Meisner. And I've worked at Circle Rep with Marshall W. Mason and Lanford Wilson and some really good people. I was lucky. I had a lot of really good influences.

Brad Dourif

#2. 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

#3. The American actor is very lucky ... Because so little is asked of him.

Sanford Meisner

#4. 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

#5. The text is your greatest enemy.

Sanford Meisner

#6. There's no such thing as nothing.

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#8. You can't learn to act unless you're criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you'll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.

Sanford Meisner

#9. 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

#10. Listen with your gut, not your head.

Sanford Meisner

#11. Don't be an actor. Be a human being who works off what exists under imaginary circumstances.

Sanford Meisner

#12. I was a student of Sanford Meisner for three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and I studied with Lee Strasburg for five years and became a member of the Actors Studio. What I studied came right from the horse's mouth. My students have a lot to learn from me, and I am so eager to share it.

Lainie Kazan

#13. The Gift of a New Day that talks about new motivation and a new outlook on life. God loves to make things new! Avoid

Audrey Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#16. WHY is the most important word in an actor's vocabulary.

Sanford Meisner

#17. I studied technique for ten years, from age 7 to 17. I guess you could say I went more on the Stanislavski side than the Meisner side - there's always that wide divide among actors when it comes to technique.

Thomas Ian Nicholas

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

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#20. If you want to reach every person in the audience, it's not about being bigger, it's about going deeper.

Sanford Meisner

#21. 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

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

Sanford Meisner

#23. To be inventive, to have ideas, is an organic part of being talented.

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#25. That's very different, picking up the impulse instead of picking up the cue.

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#27. You know it's all right to be wrong, but it's not all right not to try.

Sanford Meisner

#28. Technique is something that you use if you need it. Otherwise, to hell with it.

Sanford Meisner

#29. That which hinders your task is your task.

Sanford Meisner

#30. For the thousandth time, Faith wondered why this appealed to her. She detested letting men walk all over her, letting them think they were supreme beings. But when Mr. Meisner did all these diabolical things to her, her body fired up and wanted more.

Cari Silverwood

#31. I studied with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I was in the last class to study with him before he had his larynx removed, so I actually remember the sound of his voice. He was an incredible teacher.

Mary Steenburgen

#32. Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater, silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning.

Sanford Meisner

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

Sanford Meisner

#34. Meisner technique was different than anything I'd ever experienced. It's a really great way to be accountable to your craft and to yourself, but also it takes that kind of focus and dedication to learn anything.

Mariska Hargitay

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

Sanford Meisner

#36. Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

Sanford Meisner

#37. Every time I am reading actors I can pretty well tell which ones have studied with Meisner. It is because they are honest and simple and don't lay on complications that aren't necessary.

Arthur Miller

#38. I don't really have a method or a technical process. I studied [Sanford] Meisner, and that's the thing that really works for me. That sort of instinctual, in the moment, what the other actors do, working off them and letting the story unfold, as opposed to having an idea of what the story should be.

Maria Bello

#39. Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.

Elia Kazan

#40. 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

#41. With a developed imagination there's no place you can't go.

Sanford Meisner

#42. 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

#43. You don't pick up cues, you pick up impulses.

Sanford Meisner

#44. The truth of your instincts is the root of your foundation.

Sanford Meisner

#45. Courage means willing to risk everything.

Sanford Meisner

#46. 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

#47. 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

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

Sanford Meisner