George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I love theater. I love the idea that you can transform, become somebody else, and look at life with a completely new perspective. I love the idea that people will sit in one room for a couple of hours and listen.

At the end of the day, acting is all about telling lies. We are professional imposters and the audience accept that. We've made this deal that we tell you a tale and a pack of lies, but there will be a truth in it. You may enjoy it, or it will disturb you.

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.

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.

When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.

Actors are the most important. Performance is what matters. Nothing matters more than the actors; they have to perform. No one else can give life to the characters. Audiences must believe the characters as real and the moments as real.

One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.

I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.

All I really want to do is entertain people out there sitting in the dark and for them to believe it.

Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

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

When it comes to acting, people talk about the suspension of disbelief that you ask of the audience. Before that starts, you have to, as an actor, suspend your own disbelief.

My poor sight gives me an advantage. I can't see the people in the audience who are scratching their heads while I am lost in my role and giving everything I have to the drama.

For me, making a lot of dramas on one side it's a different sort of challenge, and on the other, it's not a challenge at all, meaning that my goal is to try and bring the realism and acting you might find in a straight drama with the intentions and conflict, where it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek, but rather committed and real.

Actors, we like stories, we like storytelling, we love being a part of the story, and if you give us a story that's interesting then we'll want to do it.

Performing is just standing up there and doing something. Performance takes on an edge to it. It has a more dramatic context.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

I see theater as a simple formula. Audience plus players plus story makes the play.