Sam Rayburn Quotes

There's a oneness to showing yourself to an audience. They feel that. It's healthy. That's what acting is all about.

For a time, I really thought acting was just impersonating. But impersonation is just big brush strokes, really. What makes acting different is empathy.

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

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

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

I'm not a pyrotechnical director; I'm not good with all those innovative things. What I am interested in is how actors can touch the heads and hearts of an audience.

I think that acting involves doing your job so well that you are able to help the viewer identify with the character.

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 love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

It's about what happens on stage, whether we can deliver it in a hungry way that is who we are in our hearts.

Acting is the most communicative thing I can imagine doing.

I am not interested in entertaining people. I think being an actor provides an opportunity to give people an experience they can connect to, reflect on, learn from, laugh at.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

In any character I ever play, whether she's good or bad or whatever, my most important thing is heart.

I love intimacy, always, of performing.

Movie acting is primarily listening. If you're really engaged, that's all a movie audience wants to see is you processing what's happening in your world.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it's nothing, and he was right.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

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.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

I love acting. It's an interesting challenge to make something that doesn't exist appear like it's happening, and to do it in a real way.