Elia Kazan Quotes

You can keep yourself alive. That's the magic of being an actor.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

We all want to escape our circumstances, don't we? Especially if you are an actor.

Acting is a bit of a heart and soul exercise with me. It's kind of all I've got.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.

I'm interested in a lot. Like right now, I'm just really excited for 'Catching Fire' and 'Mockingjay' Part 1 and 2. But I love playing characters like Prim - I mean, Prim is like my dream character - but after 'The Hunger Games', it would be fun to look and see what else I could do well. But right now, Prim is like my dream role.

Every actor and actress is possessed of the absorbing passion to create something distinctive and unique.

I'm an actor. I love to create.

Acting makes you live plenty of lives.

What made me fall in love with acting, which is my life, was watching other people perform. It made me hunger to do that.

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.

To me acting originally became an extension of game playing.

I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.

It's fun to do accents; it's fun to do different periods - that's why you become an actor. Because it's fun to be a storyteller and play make-believe.

I like to jump into different worlds. I'm attracted to the emotional rollercoaster of acting. Now I've been doing it for so many years, I must rather enjoy it.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

I probably became an actor because of my vivid imagination, and doing voice-over really sort of takes me back to that.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

I always had a dramatic flair. I'd like to dress up like a cowboy, play make-believe. But I didn't realize acting was something I had to do until I got to college.

Sometimes you think about the job that we, as actors, do. I take it very seriously, and I care very much about it, but I'm paid to make believe. When you're a kid, you go to your friend's house, and it's, 'Let's pretend we're both cowboys!' Without belittling it, that's basically what I do - I tell stories.

There is something special about being an actor and able to bring somebody's visualisation - director, storywriter and script writer - into life. It is almost like creating a person.

We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. We are not finding the next cure for Alzheimer's. We are simply and merely entertainment. We take on and wear the masks of characters. That's what we're paid to do.

Artists are so blessed as we get to live so many lives while doing different films.