Play Acting Quotes

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.

I played Big Mama in 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' when I was 20 years old at the University of Michigan.

I used to play Donna Karan. I used my dad's home office, and Kim was my assistant. Then one of our friends would play a buyer, and I would take her to my mom's closet and show her the new collection.

I was Jenny in 'Jenny and the School for Cats' when I was five years old. That was my first big break. Then I got to play the Artful Dodger in 'Oliver Twist,' and that was the most fun I've ever had.

I would love to play Mary in 'Long Day's Journey Into Night' or 'Virginia Woolf' or a comedy - just, like, a slapstick comedy.

I began my career with Gujarati and Hindi plays in 1973.

I remember one play [when I was kid] was about this murderous mad scientist, and my whole part was to be the guy who got thrown into a vat of acid as the curtain went up. I was very pissed off at these older kids; they'd outsmarted me.

I performed in plays like 'Ashwatthama' and 'Andha Yug.' It was hardcore theatre.

I love Westerns and I remember as a kid climbing up on the couch and make it into a saddle and shoot guns and fall off. I would lay there after my death and my mom would tell me to eat lunch and I'd say, 'I'm still dead, Mom!' I was Method, even then.

His life has been lived, so far, within narrow limits and he is quite naïve about most kinds of experience; he fears it and yet is wildly eager for it. To reassure himself, he converts it into epic myth as fast as it happens. He is forever play-acting.

I don't know why every actor doesn't do more plays.

I'd love to play Hamlet.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

From being a writer of plays, it was not that surprising that somebody thought of giving me a job as an actor. After I played one part, others came along.

From a Buddhist point of view, emotions are not real. As an actor, I manufacture emotions. They're a sense of play. But real life is the same. We're just not aware of it.

Here's what I knew about doing a play: I knew it would make me a better actor.

I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.

Anyone can play Henry VIII. I mean, even Robert Shaw... has played it.

I love villains. You know, I am a character actor, and any chance to get to play a really outrageous villain. I like to play that.

I have done one or two plays in New York briefly.

It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.

I would love to play Bobby in 'Company.' Also, I would love to play George in 'Sunday.'

Of all the roles I've done on the stage, I'm partial to Cyrano de Bergerac.

I had great difficulty in school interacting with others, and I took refuge in the contrived setting of play acting, which is what I still do.

In a play, a few actors perform a few characters, and they need to perform those characters with a certain level of believability so that audiences can actually understand and see them as those characters.