Bette Davis Quotes

You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

When you're acting in a scene, you're focused on doing the scene. You can't break character and go, 'Oh my God, I love what you're doing!'

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

I don't cry. Well, you know, I think coming from an acting background that's really helped me because I more than anyone know that an actor creates a character.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

Actors must practice restraint, else think what might happen in a love scene.

I think when you're an actor and you're drawing on your emotions all the time, you need to be quite steady.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

I'm an actor, paid to act. I don't bring personal problems to the sets. Dad taught me that.

In a way, making Martin Ellingham the way he is was a corrective exercise for my acting - to keep a bit still and show a little control. I do like it - it's like having an instrument that you can play and that you can pick up and enjoy playing.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

The dressing room is not the place where you show emotion.

Even as a boy, my dad always told me, 'Don't show emotion.' If I banged my cue, he would give me a row and say, 'Stop that.' Don't show any petulance. It was developed, certainly, but I think you have got to have it in you.

It had been drilled into us that when an audience pays to see a performance, it is entitled to the best performance you can give.Nothing in your personal life must interfere, neither fatigue, illness, nor anxiety--not even joy.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

Art without technique is invertebrate, shapeless, characterless.

A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

If the director's a communist, whatever, he's a communist. All I care is that he directs. For the actor, the same thing. All you really care is that he comes in and performs.

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.

To me, acting is a matter of absolute concentration. You can laugh and giggle with your friends up to the minute the director says, "Action!" Then you snap your mind into shape and into the character that you're playing and relate to the people that you're acting with and forget everybody else that you've been joking with.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

There were decades I didn't play sober. I thought, Who would want to? But at some point, I decided that if it was important enough to me to keep doing it as art, I should do it with all my tools.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.