Sarah Steele Quotes

I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.

The theater was my first training ground. It taught me discipline, dedication and appreciation of hard work.

I know from teaching that actors want to act. Even the subtlest actors can do a little too much.

The conversation of how you do a play is my favorite conversation in the whole wide world: what a play is, why it's different than anything else, the math of the way that human behavior has to be calibrated theatrically versus anything else.

When you write a script, you hope that people will give it life beyond the script.

Theatre's a whole different beast to film. It requires a lot more of you.

Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back.

If I talk about Charles Dance I am talking about something else, something I operate and wind up and have to make an impression with and use to transmit someone else's screenplay.

I think basically an actor is a salesman.

In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.

I'd never done a straight play before, never, and it was very hard work - really, really hard work. It was dense, really wordy, and I was determined to learn every word of it - not just skip over bits and pieces.

Memorizing dialogue has always come easy and quickly to me. My wife Eileen is also very helpful. She gives me choices, and asks me questions, and runs my lines with me.

The most difficult thing to do is drama.

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

I'm not used to a script.

It's all performing; that's what we do in life. We talk, we look, and we hear, and we listen. Your life is a performance.

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

When you're an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.

As an actor, I am meant to dabble with different themes and genres.

There's no mystery to it. Nothing more complicated than learning lines and putting on a costume.

Acting is very immediate.

The role of an actor is to make every character believable.

I always know my lines.

The great thing about doing theater is that you get to do it better the next night.

I think the hardest thing I've had to learn is that just because people might speak a certain way in real life doesn't mean it's engaging in the theater.