Montgomery Clift Quotes

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

I've been aware of the work I do as an actor being directorial in feel.

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

As an actor, I've always been interested in making sure I can perform the role and the lines in the way the writer intended.

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I love it when people take contemporary songs and find a narrative or a theatrical way of telling it.

Drama is not a literal portrayal of events. It's a depiction, it's impressionistic.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

It's hard for me to consider something in cinema or theater as something realistic.

The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

I was particularly proud of my performance as the Joker. I considered it a piece of pop art.