You are not in business to be popular.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.

For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

The hardest part has been maintaining a small head -- remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.

The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.

From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, "You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been." Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.

When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. Before going into a fire, there's the same surge of adrenaline you get just before the camera rolls.

First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes. [On filming MacHale's Navy]

The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.

Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

Actors search for rejection. If they don't get it they reject themselves.

When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams.

An actor is only merchandise.

I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.

Celebrity is death --- celebrity -- that's the worst thing that can happen to an actor.

Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. [On his acting techniques]

I am the Fred Astaire of karate.

Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.

You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

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

I'd prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It's such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don't and they're like, "They're trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she's looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.

I find myself fascinating.

I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.

Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.

The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky. [On being an actor]

The actor's popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.

I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.

If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.

An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Acting is happy agony.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar -- you pretend it's not there.

We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.

Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that's about all there is to it.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.

An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of "artistic" expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.

I don't do T & A very well because I haven't got much of either.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

People say I'm cocky, but am I supposed to sit here and be insecure and not know where my future's going or not realize that moviemaking is the greatest thing to happen to me?

We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, "Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?"

It's not a field, I think, for people who need to have success every day: if you can't live with a nightly sort of disaster, you should get out. I wouldn't describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that the ghosts you chase you never catch.

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

After Blood Simple, everybody thought I was from Texas. After Mississippi Burning, everybody thought I was from Mississippi and uneducated. After Fargo, everybody's going to think I'm from Minnesota, pregnant, and have blonde hair. I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

This is not a tough job. You read a script. If you like the part and the money is O.K., you do it. Then you remember your lines. You show up on time. You do what the director tells you to do. When you finish, you rest and then go on to the next part. That's it.

I'm not an actress who can create a character. I play me.

Left eyebrow raised, right eyebrow raised.

Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

I have to act to live.

The actor becomes an emotional athlete. The process is painful -- my personal life suffers.

She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

You can't do four movies and be good to everybody and be flying all night and shooting all day with a different wig and then be going to sing on Broadway without feeling a little tired. You endlessly feel you're letting somebody down.

All men practice the actor's art.

Ah just act the way ah feel.

I don't want to read about some of these actresses who are around today. They sound like my niece in Scarsdale. I love my niece in Scarsdale, but I won't buy tickets to see her act.

I don't think there's a punch-line scheduled, is there?

In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum.

I must say that acting was good training for the political life that lay ahead of us.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.

Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead. [On his college registration experience]

An actress must never lose her ego -- without it she has no talent.

Actors ought to be larger than life. You come across quite enough ordinary, nondescript people in daily life and I don't see why you should be subjected to them on the stage too.

You know how in high school you do these plays and people come up after the show and they're really excited for you? Well, that's what's happening to me right now.

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

I'm not handsome in the classical sense. The eyes droop, the mouth is crooked, the teeth aren't straight, the voice sounds like a Mafioso pallbearer, but somehow it all works.

Do not try to push your way through to the front ranks of your profession; do not run after distinctions and rewards; but do your utmost to find an entry into the world of beauty.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing -- all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art -- at the door.

Imagination, industry, and intelligence -- "the three I s" -- are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without doubt, imagination.

I can't tell you how many shows I've done with full-blown migraine headaches.

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

Actors are one family over the entire world.

The mug is a tool. My ace in the hole. To have looks is the bonus on top of what motivates me to be an actor. Not to realize they're an asset would be counterproductive to the cause; they serve the common good.