Lee Strasberg Quotes

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

I'm just an instinctive actress, I've never had a lesson in my life.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

When I see an emotion being enacted by a great actor, I always feel I can never do that.

Acting keeps me alert to people, and life. I don't know, there's something about going to work early in the morning, and having to stay alert and concentrated. Maybe that keeps your mind alive.

I've been in front of the camera a million times as a musician, and even directed a few music videos. So, I know a lot about spacing, focus, blocking, etcetera. So, acting isn't totally new for me. Still, I find it fascinating, because you actually get to be another person.

The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.

All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.

Acting is the developing of one's own personality, too, you know. That's what the public buys in a star, shall we say, the personality thing.

The process of acting, not necessarily the business of acting, but the actual doing of it in the moment is my greatest kind of personal passion, the thing that brings me alive the most. Also, my two children.

Acting is the only time when I truly maintain the spontaneity that I want to be present at all times.

I love actors. Part of that is my theater background and being a writer who cares about performance. Actors have usually chosen their profession because they have a dream of doing it and they want to express something about the world. That's the same thing that I have with writing. Most of the good actors get into it for those reason, rather than for reasons of fame or fortune, or anything like that, and that's where I'm coming from, as a storyteller.

Nobody is more truthful when he's acting than De Niro.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

Each action of the actor on the stage should be the visible concomitant of his thoughts.

The actor should not play a part. Like the Aeolian harps that used to be hung in the trees to be played only by the breeze, the actor should be an instrument played upon by the character he depicts.

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

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

There are actors who are really fantastically talented at being natural on screen and appearing to be themselves, but I like the challenge of becoming somebody else.

There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you'd like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they're not, is a lot.

Crying does not equal good acting.

You've heard that old expression from Shakespeare, 'Just speak the speech'? The words themselves will take you to the reality of the character. And so this led me to interview people.

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

For me, what makes great actors, always is how truthful they are to the character and the story and the emotion that they're trying to tell.