Jeff Garcia Quotes

All the world's a stage.

We just had to stay out-of-the-way [in Fences]. [August Wilson] already wrote a masterpiece. And you really don't know how it's going to work until you get it in front of an audience.

I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

When you come to actually act, it's a game. It may be a very serious game, but it's still a game. If you lose that sense of play, the work suffers.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

One of the greatest things I've learned, as an actor, was how to talk to actors.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it. I think we ask too many questions of ourselves. We make too much importance of stuff. But I do say to actors when I have taught in classes, or when I sometimes do a talk to a group. I'll say, “If I never acted again, the world wouldn't stop, nor would it stop if I didn't stop acting. That's how important it is. I know it [seems] important when you're young. But I say, “Lighten up. Don't take it all so seriously.” All the gurus and teachers will take your money and run.

What I've found is that stage is very much a foundation of acting. It's where it all began and you're working with that repetition.

When it's all said and done, I'm very, very glad to work in this business, but that's exactly what it is. It's a business, and I get to do the fun half of it. I get paid to pretend. I get to play really great characters. And, we have such a wonderful writer. She just knows people so intricately, and it's so fun to be able to act out her words.

I've always enjoyed performing. I was in figure skating before, and then I joined my first school play. Ever since that, you have not been able to get me out of the theater.

I've been working in theater, really, since about 1965. I started working with the Mabou Mines about then, and in a way I've always worked in the theater, but it's never been a main part of my work. And it wasn't until Einstein that I kind of shifted into high gear with theater, working with Bob, with Bob Wilson. And since then I find it a very attractive form to work in. It's just an extension of my work.

As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.

I love theatre because that is my foundation. So, if I had to make a choice in terms of where I get the most fulfillments, it would be theatre. The reaction is so immediate, unlike with TV and film.

We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.

I don't think musicals are my thing. I'm not a big fan. Definitely have to get on the stage and do something like a straight play.

I remember one play [when I was kid] was about this murderous mad scientist, and my whole part was to be the guy who got thrown into a vat of acid as the curtain went up. I was very pissed off at these older kids; they'd outsmarted me.

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

The acting is more of a secondary thing for me now. I will be in it, if I'm the best man for the job, but it really is about creating characters and shows.

I've always been into theater and movies. When I was in school, I did a monologue for my talent show. I would go to the local theater. I was always in dance. I was always performing. That was always my thing.

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

I've taken [acting] class with Larry Moss, who's more kind of in the theater world, so he's really educated me about playwrights.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

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.

I think that acting is a very humanizing profession.

Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser