Lee Strasberg Quotes

What I've discovered is, really, acting is acting is acting. It's all the same. Seventy-five percent of the skills are the same in both media.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

You can equate acting to a tennis game: When you're playing one of the best, you get better.

I've always been an actor. That's my job — I can be anything you want me to be.

You don't do characters that are the same as you, otherwise why bother to act?

I love acting. I love what I do. I am absolutely filled every day with gratitude that I get to do it.

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being able to visualize language as something you perform, not just something that's there on the page.

If I'm not good at acting, I'm not good at anything else.

To go on being an actor, you need sheer animal energy. If you can't restock your energy, you have to hide your lack of it.

All I knew how to do was to act. That's the only thing I had in my favor. That was the thing that propelled me forward.

I'm interested in doing some acting in the future, but it's a distant second to stand up.

I never really took any acting classes. I'm just a natural ham, I guess.

The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.

As far as being an actor is concerned, you have to have passion. If you're not bringing the passion of the character into the room with you, you might as well not come into the room at all.

I'm addicted to acting.

I have some friends who are actors. I've watched them work. And I would say that of all the arts, acting is the most grueling, thankless. Never apologize for your work.

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.

What I like about theatre is the responsibility you have with your character.

I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.

People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much.

Being an actor is easy, just picture someone in a room and you outside waiting for your cue to go in. Elliot Gould's been trying that for forty years.

I always grew up around acting. I did commercials as a kid and all that kind of stuff and my oldest brother did theatre in High School. It's funny, when I was 15 I had a friend of mine who dragged me away to a camp at Boston University. It was the first time truthfully that acting didn't feel presentational; it felt very personal. I didn't just feel like I was singing and dancing for my friends in High School. It felt like I was doing a scene and all of a sudden I started to feeling something - I started to feel emotional.

The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that's maybe not a skill, it's a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It's my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world.

I think for acting on stage and in film, one informs the other. Obviously, they require really different kinds of discipline and really different kinds of work. It's more along the same continuum, for me.