Vivien Leigh Quotes

I think that acting is a very humanizing profession.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

Most actors are very deeply passionate about their line of work. I suppose there are probably people who sell insurance policies that are passionate about it, but I'm thinking the ratio is a little higher for actors. But, I may be wrong.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it. I think we ask too many questions of ourselves. We make too much importance of stuff. But I do say to actors when I have taught in classes, or when I sometimes do a talk to a group. I'll say, “If I never acted again, the world wouldn't stop, nor would it stop if I didn't stop acting. That's how important it is. I know it [seems] important when you're young. But I say, “Lighten up. Don't take it all so seriously.” All the gurus and teachers will take your money and run.

One of the reasons I took up acting was to learn to be more human, to get in touch with human emotions.

I think acting is magic. If I tell you all about myself it will spoil it.

Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.

I know people think that acting is not quite the occupation of grown-ups, but it is actually the ultimate learning process: You get a multitude of experiences, all for the price of one life.

Sometimes I think, 'To hell with acting' and then I realize I could be working at a shoe shop. Acting is much cooler.

Someone called actors 'sculptors in snow.' Very apt. In the end, it's all nothing.

Every actor, I don't care what they say, their roles are a lot more interesting than we are, and at the end of the day, it's still entertainment or fantasy. I think we can learn a lot from the characters we play and I find that the characters are even more noble than myself.

Acting has been described as farting about in disguise.

They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.

Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.

Theater has always been most important to my psyche.

You're lacking a human dimension of some sort if you're not interested in the arts.

The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

I think of being an actor as a blue-collar profession.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

When we think of an actor, we think of a tanned, frosted-tipped, model-looking guy. We don't think of a plumber.

I became an actor because it was the only thing I could do. I didn't have any friends, I didn't fit in. But when I started acting everything in my life shifted and I felt happy.

I wasn't working much. So I focused on studying, and I really learned what it means to be an actor. And here I was on Jonny Quest,working with all these great people from back in the golden age of Hollywood, who came up doing radio. These were journeymen, working actors. It made me proud, and gave me some insight into what acting was really about if you weren't a star.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Acting is divine dissatisfaction. It's the greatest thing in the world to do, but you are never satisfied with it ever.

Acting is just a job. I'm exactly the same as that lady bringing us coffee, and I have to remember that.