Laurence Olivier Quotes

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.

You know to me, being a good actor, the most important quality is you've got to love to play, and to just be open to anything.

I love performing and pretending - it's very easy for me.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.

I think, in a lot of ways, directing is puppeteering. I guess I see a lot of analogies between what puppeteers and filmmakers do. There's something about creating life out of things that have no life.

The whole idea of spellbinding, of being an entertainer, being the center of the stage, making up words - that let me know that writing is nice.

Having full faith that you can write something completely insane, and your actress will ground it and make it feel real, is a very liberating feeling.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

I love being creative. I love acting, but I also love directing because you get to have a vision for the whole and bring that vision to fruition.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

I was Aladdin, and then I was Captain Von Trapp from 'Sound Of Music' when I was 7 or 8, and then King Arthur. I was always the lead. I've always enjoyed being onstage, acting obnoxious, being someone that wasn't me, hiding behind a character.

I love acting because it's empowering. It empowers me.

That's precisely what we do as actors: try to convince the audience we are somebody else. And if you can do that, you are really doing something.

I still love finding the soul of the characters I play and defining who they are. This to me is my paint set, and the colors are always exciting to choose.

If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler.