Nicolas Cage Quotes

I guess every actor has certain emotions they can access easier than others.

You know how there's always the one girl in drama school who can cry at the drop of a hat? She has that emotional well she can tap into in a second? I'm not that girl. It takes a lot to get me to that place.

Now that I'm acting, I've realized that I don't have a lot of barriers. Certain actors have a hard time with anger or with joy or with whatever, and, I don't know, I don't seem to have those barriers.

Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

Mads is such a talented actor - it's almost like he wears his emotions on his sleeve, but not all the time - when he decides that he needs to, he has such access to his emotional life and it is just really incredible. He can do everything with just his eyes.

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.

It's good for actors to confront those things we have to act: panic, pain and death.

An actor matures with experiences, and the more the emotions he/she has been through, the greater the intensity of performances.

I don't think many people get to play big emotions in life.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

I'm a human being. I feel all emotions. I'm not just happy all the time. Sometimes, I'm sad and feel the blues. Sometimes I even want to feel the blues. Sometimes, you want to feel down.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

If you only live in the world of the actor, and if you only live in the world of auditions, etc., then you don't really have a whole lot to offer when it comes to playing the humans that you're trying to audition for.

I feel that one of the hardest things in acting is the way you need to switch your emotions.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.

I'm convinced that I've been hired for jobs because I can cry on cue.

I think the best dramatic actors know how to tap into their character's humor.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

Luckily, on 'Kyle XY,' I had great training in being tough and vulnerable at the same time.