Marcel Marceau Quotes

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours.

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

You learn more discipline in the theatre than you do in movies or TV. You're on stage every night and you have to sustain your energy level tor several hours.

If people need to be informed by lines, then there's no reason why the actor is saying the line except for information for the audience; I think there's something wrong.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

I guess my interest in performance has evolved and changed many times over the years.

I love the theater. I love being on stage; I love the live audience. I also love dressing up and all of the make-believe.

Acting is all about timing. I mean, who has better timing than the MCs?

Acting is a talent, but I like to see the whole picture.

Everyone forgets comedians are actors. There's no question about it. A Robin Williams cannot say the same line every night for 40 weeks and make it sound fresh unless he's doing an acting job.

When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.

If I wanted to do something on stage, I wanted it to be something I could really get into and feel.

I think theater is more about living and breathing, versus TV, which can vary.

Standup led me to acting because I liked standup, and I saw people on a stage, and the closest, nearest thing to me was doing plays. It was like, that's the same thing as standup - people are on a stage; they're being seen and saying things - so, because of my love of standup, I moved towards acting.

I'm just trying to give the best human expression that I can to any particular genre, which could be comedy, could be drama, could be horror, could be thriller.

Even writing a script which will be funny is not easy. To make the script come to life and make the audience laugh, I will call myself more of an actor if I am able to do that.

The biggest impact that acting and theater had was, of course, stage presence, but it also had a big impact on my writing.

I don't see myself as an actor. I see myself as a storyteller.

When I was a kid, I thought good acting was fascinating, and I could tell the difference. I could see that at like 9 years old.

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.

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.

I've been on stage plenty of times, and one of the things about being a stage actress is you have a 3-month run to revisit the story nightly and play it again.

I think being an actor makes me a better writer and vice versa. I know the kinds of roles I would kill to play, and I try to create them for others.

When I was eight years old, I got a dummy for Christmas and started teaching myself. I got books and records and sat in front of the bathroom mirror, practising. I did my first show in the third grade and just kept going; there was no reason to quit.