H. L. Mencken Quotes

There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!

Crying does not equal good acting.

I think acting is an important profession, because acting can give you pleasure and can teach you at the same time, and that is a good thing.

Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

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.

Acting is different all the time. When you're on set, different films, or just even in between, it's never the same. I think that's one of the things I love about it.

I think that it's important not to take [acting] too seriously. It's all pretend. It's a strange job.

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.

In the story, I think as an actor you're just trying to fit into the world.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

I guess at a certain point you think, well, singing is singing and acting is acting.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

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.

I think I find it easier to live on the stage than in life.

Acting is really important to me, so I think it would be really hard for me to do something I didn't believe in.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

I didn't want to be a movie star, I wanted to be an actor. Because acting is what I fell in love with, and acting is what is still challenging for me.

Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.

I wasn't trying to do a play or do what Kevin Spacey did. I was trying to do my own thing with it.

In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.

I think that both musicals and opera have a capacity to get to an inner emotional landscape.

Acting is the developing of one's own personality, too, you know. That's what the public buys in a star, shall we say, the personality thing.