Theatrical Craft Quotes

An actor works with their soul and their thought.

I think acting is an important profession, because acting can give you pleasure and can teach you at the same time, and that is a good thing.

I didn't want to be a movie star, I wanted to be an actor. Because acting is what I fell in love with, and acting is what is still challenging for me.

It's part of my responsibility, as an actor who has been lucky enough to have this job, to take my job very seriously, show up on time, know my lines, and give the best performance that I can because I'm doing something that so many other people work very hard to have and never get.

As an actor, you always use the tools of who you are and your experience of what you have to offer.

I just love actors, and I've always loved actors. I empathize with their job. Everyone thinks it's easy, and it ain't. To be that vulnerable and brave on camera is tough.

It didn't have to be a newfound respect for the craft, I knew that it's notoriously difficult and frightens a lot of people off. I don't think anyone knows quite who to attribute it to, but the dying actor who says: "dying is easy, comedy is hard." I hear it.

Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

They say making laws is like making sausages. You shouldn't watch. It's the same for acting, especially for the actor who works unconsciously.

An actor's most important responsibility is to know lines well.

The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult.

Acting is a privilege, and I'm exceedingly blessed to be able to do what I do. At the end of the day, it's all entertainment.

It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

You never stop learning your craft. That's the key to success within yourself as an actor.

Acting is a strange profession, and, yes, sometimes I struggle with its worth, its value in the world.

You learn from the actors that you're working with. I've taken a lot from all of them.

You know, comedy's hard. With drama, you have a responsibility to the emotional truth, but with comedy, you have emotional truth and you have technique on top of it.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

Being an actor/ writer is a responsibility and a burden and a gift. The responsibility to me is that you can't just wait to be cast into something and then you create the role. You almost have a voice inside of you telling you what you might want to play and be able to play. It's hard, but once that thing comes out of the printer and you hold those warm pages to your cheek it's great. It's a huge sense of accomplishment.

An Actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

The beauty of making theater is that you have to go and do it the next day. Making a show nightly is a really difficult skill. It's something every theater actor and every theater maker is challenged with.

As an actor, you deal in fantasy, imagination, and concentration. Those are your three weapons. Those are your bullets.

I think acting is magic. If I tell you all about myself it will spoil it.

You always remember the delicacy of the work you do on a new play - the delicacy and the rigor and the courage.