Meryl Streep Quotes

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

It's true what people say - that actors are the closest thing there is to children. They play.

Actors take risks all the time. We put ourselves on the line. It is creative to be able to interpret someone's words and breathe life into them.

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

I sing as an actress. Whatever I'm singing about, I just become the story.

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

Marlon once said to me about being an actor: Can you imagine going to work every day and pretending to be someone else?

When you're rapping, you do have to perform to a certain degree, but not every rapper is necessarily a gifted actor.

I've decided as an actor the only, the power I have really is in the performance. It's the only real place I get to sort of communicate.

It's almost like I get to be more theatrical when I work in voiceover.

The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.

I've always been an actor. That's my job — I can be anything you want me to be.

A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.

I am a musician and am so thankful for that. I have no experience of war. But I find a similarity between performing music onstage and acting - a reality of emotion.

You look at somebody's work as an actor and you can see their emotional life being fed into it and you can kind of feel them through it.

I love working with actors. I grew up with a lot of actors. All my friends are actors. I love that process.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

As a film director I like to have the actors create their own close-ups. It's an older style of filmmaking.

Actors are professionals who deal with people's emotions and their thoughts.

I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That's what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn't funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

I will do plays as long as they're interested in having me do them. It's the biggest opportunity to learn the most about how to act. Something I discover every time I'm doing one is how little I know about acting - how important the art of listening is, and how important it is to listen with your entire body. You can tell so much of a story with stillness, and a lot of that can be from really actively listening to your scene partner.

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity.

As an actor, I feel like I'm somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don't want to hit it. I don't like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete.

A theater is such a revealing form of art, such a transparent and good actors, they're such powerful individuals. I always kind of dreamt that one day I will open my mouth on stage.