Stella Adler Quotes
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Your curse is that you have chosen a form that requires endless study .... It means you have to read, you have to observe, you have to think, so that when you turn your imagination on, it has the fuel to do its job.
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Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous.
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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.
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An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.
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I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.
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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 you're going to be hurt to the blood. But to retreat from the pain is death
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You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.
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When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about.
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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.
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To grow: that is your deepest and truest need when you say, 'I want to be an actor.'
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It's not important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules!
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You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.
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Emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings.
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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.
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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.
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You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. 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. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.
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You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom.
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The only excuse for not coming to a class or a performance is death.
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The play is not in the words, it’s in you!
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When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.
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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.
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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.
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The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement.
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Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.
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Your talent is in your choice.
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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.
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