Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what’s beneath the word.

You have to understand your best. Your best isn’t Barrymore’s best or Olivier’s best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier...

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don’t be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.

If you can’t take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

The thing that makes you say, “I want to do something” – that is the beginning of talent.

We dress the way we think.

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences.

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

The actor must be full of passion. If he’s too cool he’s better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

The best author is a dead author, because he’s out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

Tell yourself that the world is outside, that it’s not to be hidden from you, that you are going to thrust yourself forward and be relaxed in the world. You have chosen a field where...

Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor’s search is a generous quest...

The play is not in the words, it’s in you!

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

You’ll never really be great unless you aim high.

You’ll begin to act when you can forget your technique – when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

When you stand on the stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world, and that what you say is so important the whole world must listen.

Emotions aren’t doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.

You will fail. That’s great. Here’s a secret for you – that’s the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something. If you fail but learn something from your failure, you will...

…actors today think that being true is being nice, or being some other “set” thing. That is not the truth. That is your miserable habit of boring everybody to death.

Your talent is in your choice.

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don’t ordinarily call upon in your personal life.

You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

Acting can be the healthiest profession in the world, because it allows you to do things you can’t do in real life. It allows you to understand more than just what life provides you.

You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

Acting is in everything but the words.

You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We’re not scientists. We don’t always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.