The document contains 50 quotes about acting from various actors and acting teachers. Some key themes that emerge are: acting requires finding truth and honesty in imaginary circumstances; the best acting appears natural and is not obviously performed; acting well involves drawing on personal experiences and emotions; and creating believable relationships and conflict between characters is important. Overall, the quotes emphasize finding truth and authenticity in performance.

1.  1. Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.~ Sanford Meisner
 2. An actor is a fool for God.~ Gerardine Clark
 3. Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.~ Bette Davis
 4. The best acting is instinctive. It's not intellectual, it's not mechanical, it's instinctive.~ Craig MacDonald
 5. That's what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules. Gerardine Clark
 6. Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.~ Bette Davis
 7. Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.~ Rosalind Russell
 8. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.~ Meryl
treep
 9. Good acting -- real acting is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to
show me where.~ William Esper
 10. Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!~ Craig MacDonald
 11. Find in yourself those human things which are universal.~ Sanford Meisner
 12. The more personal, the more universal.~ Gary Ballinger
 13. An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.~ Michael Chekhov
 14. Use what you know. Don't worry about what you don't know.~ Michael Shurtleff
 15. 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.~ Stella Adler
 16. An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.~ Sanford Meisner
 17. Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.~ Michael Shurtleff
 18. If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.~ Jack Lemmon
 19. Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.~ Michael Shurtleff
 20. Listening is not merely hearing. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is active.~ Michael
Shurtleff
 21. Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.~ Michael Shurtleff
 22. Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street
Bridge.~ Michael Shurtleff
 23. Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.~ Michael Shurtleff
 24. The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.~ Michael Shurtleff
 25. Competition [in a scene] is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don't want to compete. They
want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors.~ Michael Shurtleff
 26. Honesty isn't enough for me. That becomes very boring. If you can convince people what you're doing is real and it's also bigger than life
-- that's exciting.~ Gene Hackman
 27. Take nothing for granted. Make an emotional discovery as often as you can find one in every scene. Ask yourself: What is new?~ Mi
chael Shurtleff
 28. There's only one reason why a character drinks: to seek confrontation. To fight for what they want in ways normally denied them.~ Mi
chael Shurtleff
 29. My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.~ Meryl Streep
 30. I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you.~ Meryl Streep
 31. I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.~ Meryl
Streep
 32. I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.~ Meryl Streep
 33. All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.~ Meryl Streep
 34. The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.~ Miguel de Cervantes
 35. Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.~ William Esper
 36. Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.~ W. C. Fields
 37. Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.~ George Burns
 38. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.~ W.H. Auden
 39. Actors die so loud.~ Henry Miller
 40. I love acting. It is so much more real than life.~ Oscar Wilde
 41. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.~ Thornton Wilder
 42. 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.~ Stella Adler
 43. I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.~ Michael Caine
 44. Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.~
Michael Shurtleff
 45. Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.~
George Bernard Shaw
 46. There's nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be
other things.~ Tim Robbins
 47. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.~ Stella Adler
 48. I think your self emerges more clearly over time.~ Meryl Streep
 49. I need to go where people are serious about acting.~ Meryl Streep
 50. The work will stand, no matter what.~ Meryl Streep