Elia Kazan Quotes

All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.

Theater is like going to the gym for actors.

The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement.

Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her.

I was never an actress -- none of us kids at Metro were. We were just good to look at.

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 really like to work with theater actors. Theater actors tend to do lots of independent movies, and those are the actors that I like.

I regret not having enough training, I trained for a year at The Royal Court, but I very quickly went off to do films and television.

I loved getting classical training in terms of acting. I would've stayed in acting school for the rest of my life if I could have. It was this amazing period of my life where everything was so safe.

There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think. If you're an actor in England, that's just the way to get into it but I've been so incredibly lucky in that I was brought up in to it. I still might go to drama school, if I wanted to do theater work, definitely. It's a completely different type of training.

I went to drama college in England - the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London. I was there for not quite two years, then I got Star Wars.

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

Theater is a really exciting place to return to all the time because it's incredible training for an actor.

I was trained to be an actor, not a star.

I like to think of myself as an actress, I think of going through all of the films as my kind of film academy, the way that I've learnt.

All that back-story stuff doesn't help. What you get paid for is to stand toe-to-toe with the other actor and get him to do your will.

Theater was such a different school of acting. But it really is a foundation of everything. It's where it all started! And I feel like I learned so much.

I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.

I'm not a method actress.

Mine is an actor's voice, not a singer's voice, but the part was written for an actor (Richard Burton), not a singer.

Most actors are very deeply passionate about their line of work. I suppose there are probably people who sell insurance policies that are passionate about it, but I'm thinking the ratio is a little higher for actors. But, I may be wrong.

Actors, said Granny, witheringly. As if the world weren't full of enough history without inventing more.

As a director and an actor, it is very difficult to say "this person was better than another person." I judge by chemistry of the actors but it is difficult being a judge. I will never bash any of the actors.

I always felt that I was more of an actress than a - I can't tell a joke to save my soul, but that I was a comedic actress.

I wasn't a trained actor, I was trained in musical comedy theater, and when you do that, the audience is completely part of the thing. It's like Elizabethan theater. You play the scene, and then you turn - the audience is part of it.