David Schwimmer Quotes

As an actor, you pay attention very closely to everything that happens to you, and you're constantly watching others as well, trying to just find out where everything comes from.

I'm an actor, and I keep observing people and their reactions to figure out what they are thinking. There's only so much you can do on your own, so you have to keep learning. Art imitates life.

A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It's important to alternate between the two activities.

My only qualifications to be an actor were that I'm daring, and I'm a quick learner. I've always learnt by watching what other people do. It's the same with my writing. I write what I know. Structurally, I write in a very undisciplined way.

To be a good actor you have to feel life and observe life.

One of the first lessons you learn as an actor is to listen.

One of the most important things for an actor is to observe humanity.

Just observing - that's the best skill of all for an actor!

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

As an actor, it is my job to prepare for the role I am playing.

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

I work with my acting coach to help me get into character and do pronunciation drills and tongue twisters to help me deliver lines.

I am a proud participant of the Spencer Tracy School of Acting: Know your lines, don't bump into the furniture.

I'm always looking, as an actor, for activities. I think it's far more interesting to watch what people do than what they say. You always want to watch behavior, because the dialogue as written by our illustrious leaders is great. Eminently playable.

Drama school can't make you a brilliant actor, but you can do stuff for three years - you're not going to be fired. You should just go for it all, even the stuff you think is codswallop.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

The difference between working with actors that have put their time in the theater and just straight film and television actors is that you trust theater actors a lot more. You know that they're seriously more trained than anyone else because theater is the best place to grow as an actor.

I pick up a lot of stuff from them, but I don't think there's any great trick to acting.

Basically, the actor's job is to pay attention to the script.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

As an actor, your life experience is just as important as studying.

I am a really writer-oriented actor.

There are a thousand ways to play any role.

I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with.

Well, what is acting but the study of human behavior? And that's so fascinating to me.