Elaine Dundy Quotes

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

I'm getting bored performing the same songs over and over. Songwriting comes and goes.

I am far from sure when I am acting and when I am not or, should I more frankly put it, when I am lying and when I am not. For what is acting but lying and what is good acting but convincing lying?

We move through the day like two hands of a clock: sometimes we overlap for a moment, then come apart again, carrying on alone. Everyday exactly the same: the tea, the burnt toast, the crumbs, the silence.

You don't want to get into doing the same thing, over and over again. I know I don't.

Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land.

Another day gone and no jokes.

After having been confined to a television series - and it's a luxury job - where you can't play anything but one particular character for nine months out of the year, it will make you insane. It didn't affect me. I got out quick enough.

Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so' you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'

Oh, how daily life is. (Ah, que la vie est quotidienne.)

Everybody does the same thing over and over again. I like to do the same thing every day.

Going on tour, you don't have a lot of time to mull things over. You're just kind of, "Another beer, another show, another song."

I actually tell lies for a living. Exactly. I mean, that's what acting is, really.

Let's have a day in the life of Gerard." Going to get coffee! Going to get coffee!' That's all it would be.

Get up. Go to work. Play the game. Get showered. Go home.

It isn't called TV money for nothing. There was a time where I paid my rent by doing theater for years, and I was able to buy groceries and pay my electric bill. I considered myself to be making a living as an actor. This kind of money that we make is a whole other level, of course. But it really is simply the cherry on top of a job and a role that I adore.

I find sometimes that if you do too many takes, it starts to become meaningless to me. It is hard to sustain it for me. I don't want to do too many.

Sometimes when you're on tour, it feels like you're living the same day over and over again.

One of the first sights that shocked me, when I came to Israel in 1921, was an Arab turning over a field with a very primitive plow; pulling the plow were an ox and a woman. Now, if it means that we have destroyed this romantic picture by bringing in tractors, combines, and threshing machines, this is true: we have.

Marlon once said to me about being an actor: Can you imagine going to work every day and pretending to be someone else?

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Accelerando means in tempo. Don't rush.

England occupies a warm spot in my affections. It was the scene of my greatest performance. I was born there.

That's one of the things of being an actor. You have to push any knowledge of any future, at all, out of your mind. You never know what's going to happen where.