Alan Alda Quotes

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

Acting is about listening, and that's something that took me awhile. You almost don't have to learn your lines, if you listen to what they're saying and move it along.

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

One of the things I love about acting is other actors, looking into their eyes, and working off them, and listening and responding to them.

The more and more I work with really great actors, the more it's about opening yourself up to what they bring.

The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.

Good actors can sort of see into people and immediately you have a chemistry with them or not. It's like an affair with no mess.

Acting lessons teach you to really listen to what the other person is saying because in acting it's all about responding to the lines.

When you see bad acting, that's usually what it is - they're not listening to the other characters. It's always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.

I often have the feeling that acting is really not difficult, because all I do is I just listen. I just listen. I just listen to what there is. And if there's nothing, then I listen to nothing. If there's a chair, and it's empty, I listen to an empty chair, and I will respond to it.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

The best way to persuade people is with your ears - by listening to them.

It is hard sometimes to see how other actors are working when you are working with them.

I think all great actors - and I don't classify myself as one of them, incidentally - but I think all great actors listen well and I've learned that from a lot of the very good actors with whom I've worked - to really listen to what people say.

Acting is reacting. You can't react if you're not paying attention, if you're not listening.

Communication is so key.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.

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.

All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening.

I like doing a lot of research, and then you get there, you're in wardrobe, and then you're just reacting to what the other person is doing. The other actor is reacting to what you're doing, and it's this great back and forth. Because you've done all this research, you can use some of it or throw a lot of it out. You can get lost in it.

Unfortunately, when you're an actor you have to act. It's not like you can sit in your living room, your bedroom, your study or whatever and act with yourself. It requires having somebody to respond to.

I learned one thing from De Niro: He taught me to listen. Nobody says anything strictly from the script. It's improvised. It was the best piece of advice I have ever gotten in my life. It has helped me through the past thirty years.