Ellen Burstyn Quotes

I'm taking my time with the acting and learning as I go.

I want to challenge myself as an actor.

I love acting classes. I think they're great. It's like working out in the gym. It's a great place to figure out everything that's working and what isn't working.

I am learning the grammar of acting on the sets. And I am happy that way.

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

The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.

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

I've had probably way too many acting classes, and you try to sort of shed - I think over a period of time, you'll shed what doesn't stick with you, and you'll hang onto those things that do.

I want to discover more things about acting.

From an acting standpoint, when I was a kid, I thought I knew everything there was to know. As the years go by, this craft becomes more intensive as I get older. You realize how much more there is to know and to learn, and how much better you can get, if you really work at it.

As an actor, you keep learning. There's no end to it.

I'm grateful to be in school developing my practice as an actor. In that process, it's difficult to say that you've definitively 'learned' something.

I plan to take time out and read, learn, and absorb more about acting.

I never went to school to study acting, so I'm doing this purely on feeling, and I give it my all.

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 took acting lessons when I was 19, 20, and I had my writing.

I think that different actors go about their preparation differently, but when it comes to acting, I use my imagination.

I have learned that acting is not about beauty.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

Meisner technique was different than anything I'd ever experienced. It's a really great way to be accountable to your craft and to yourself, but also it takes that kind of focus and dedication to learn anything.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

My acting range has always been something between the two extremes of 'raises left eyebrow' and 'raises right eyebrow.'

I think the first thing is don't give up. If you love the craft. If you love being a detective and discovering who a character is and the detail of how they walk and what kind of shoes they wear and what did they do yesterday and what's important to them. I definitely advise actors to learn about the craft.

I had an acting coach while I was doing the show and every week I could see my work improving. I really liked working on the show because I was learning new things every day.

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.