Karl Lagerfeld Quotes

It's a vain craft, acting.

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

PANTOMIME, n. A play in which the story is told without violence to the language. The least disagreeable form of dramatic action.

Everything is theater.

I love acting. I love play-acting. I love pretending. I love telling stories so whether they be comedic or serious or whatever, it doesn't really matter to me. I enjoy telling a good story. I have it all in me.

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

I always distrust the word art when it is applied to acting.

Performing is just standing up there and doing something. Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.

In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

Actors are con men and con men are actors.

To be in front of an audience and pretending, and to lie, this is the principle of acting.

At the end of the day, acting is all about telling lies. We are professional imposters and the audience accept that. We've made this deal that we tell you a tale and a pack of lies, but there will be a truth in it. You may enjoy it, or it will disturb you.

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

That's what show business is, sincere insincerity.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.

We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.

Acting is a really strange thing to do; it's very strange.