Kevin Costner Quotes

I'm not the best actor I can be, so I'm just working on it. I'm not the quickest reader in the world but when I get an acting book I can read it in two days.

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

On 'Mad Men,' I have a bit of an advantage because I know who gets better as they repeat a scene and who's best at the beginning.

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.

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.

Acting is a career where you keep learning with every film you do.

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.

In the acting world, you can really only become good by practicing and doing it, and I just think every time you walk onto a set you just become better and better. I think I'm in a totally different space than I was back then on that first movie set.

To be with Derek Jacobi and Stellan Skarsgard, it's a master class in acting every day.

To be honest, there are so many things I learned in acting school beyond the method; it was a safe place to practice. So acting school was about exercising that acting muscle and doing it every single day - and having people tell you that you're bad every single day! Which pushes you to work even harder.

I know a lot of actors who get a part and then they dissect it and they want to change it and they want to add stuff. I'm always amazed and so impressed by actors who do that.

My experiences and training back at drama school were very enlightening. I always believe in improving, be it kathak or my acting skills, and would want to experiment more when it comes to work.

There's something about actors - not stars, but actors - if they have the character, and someone is pushing and shoving them to be the best they can be, they enjoy that.

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.

Even though I was theatrically trained, learning to develop a character was an awesome experience.

I try to get the best performance an actor can give.

When I first started out, I was a bad actor.

No good actor ever stops learning. He is constantly evolving.

I want to do more films because if you do a lot of films, you become a better actor.

I've always been an actor. I've always approached all my comedy as an actor.

Whether I'm playing right now or not, I still have an opportunity to get better in practice. It's like sharpening my blade.

Eight years of steady acting training nonstop... three years in the profession. And I'm still in the apprentice mode and I'm still watching everybody and learning.

I've been to acting coaches and everything, but they had to open me up and all that, so now I'm getting better with it.

That's what I've learned: you are always to improve whether you are a Hall of Fame quarterback or some rookie.

It takes me some time to get into what I am doing - since I am not a trained actor, I don't have that skill. I have to think of what I am doing and how it comes through.