Liv Ullmann Quotes

I can't do a role or character unless I have lived that character. For me, the best teacher is life.

What I use when I'm acting comes from what I learn about myself.

I'm trying to grow older with wisdom.

I believe that you go through your past and you learn what you learn for whatever reason. I'm just glad I'm not making fifteen-year-old mistakes at twenty-six - I got that out of the way.

It's a good thing I learned some humility and perspective as I got older.

That's just part of the blessing of being an actor: you get to learn so many things about life.

Everybody has certain things they wish they hadn't done in life. They wish they hadn't kicked their dog when they were ten or something. There are many things you can go back and have regrets about. I don't like doing that. But by the same token I do agree that when you get to a certain stage in life, you change. And you should change.

At least I'm not playing other people for a change. It's a very odd place to be... I feel I'm an actress who sings a bit.

I know that I've had a very fortunate life, but also I think my job as an actor is to connect emotionally to human beings.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is that it takes you places you wouldn't ordinarily go, and you don't enter as a tourist, you really enter the life of the place.

To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don't ordinarily call upon in your personal life.

Whatever the emotion is, I have learned over the years to give it space, which is also why I love acting.

In relationship with others, it is only you mirrored.

You become more and more charged with your life and with a life that you're observing. When I was younger, I was actually looking forward to getting older, to have more insight, more understanding. I'm much more tolerant with others and with myself. I'm not in rebellion all the time, I'm not angry so much. But all those feelings are really useful [when you're young] because they fire us, as long as they don't get out of control.

The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.

And so my hope for you, good boy, as you grow taller every day, is that you will learn to take good care of yourself, and you will learn to take good care of others-and, someday, you'll see how those two things are exactly the same.

A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.

Especially since I stared studying acting, I feel like I'm always super-aware of my emotions and my feelings and what's going on with me at every moment.

The school of relationships is where you learn self-knowledge. I just don't know how you could learn it sitting alone in the desert on a rock by yourself. You have to see where you fail at it. And that confrontation with your own ability - "I was again not able to love" - those are the teachable moments.

You don't spend most of your life in other people's heads without losing every prejudice you ever had.

You get kinder when you get into my age range. You think back to how really unkind you were, and how cynical you were and how you tossed things away and you tossed people away, and you didn't care because you were climbing some mountain that you thought you needed to be on top of.

Age does not bring wisdom... but it does give perspective... and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you've resisted.

I did not think I had what it took to be an actor, because most of the actors that I encountered were people who were very narcissistic and I thought since I lacked narcissism to become an actor because that's what it took. It was more of a social experiment for me to walk in the shoes of other people that I found interesting.