Stella Adler Quotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself.
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.
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 act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.
Emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.
In life, as on the stage, it's not who I am but what I do that's the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit.
Don’t use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don’t want you to be stuck with your own life. It’s too little.
The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.
Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.
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.
The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.
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 ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.
It's not important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules!
The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement.
No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.
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.
You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.
Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers.
You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life.
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 grow.
The thing that makes you say, "I want to do something" - that is the beginning of talent.
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.