All of the Vines that were acted & setup & had nice cameras, those weren’t the good Vines. The good Vines were, like, a random little kid in the middle of a forest, like, yelling.

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we’d go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father’s televised service for 17 years.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

I worked with Lawrence Olivier some years ago. He was a great mentor.

My favorite movies of all times is ‚Doctor Zhivago,‘ and I love ‚Gone With the Wind.‘ I’d love to play some Southern belle or something where I owned a plantation.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

I’m not a photographer, so I didn’t get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That’s the world that I’m moving in, in terms of acting and giving a performance.

Cameras aren’t guns. They can’t really hurt you.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

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

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

If you tell a joke in the forest, but nobody laughs, was it a joke?

Dakota Fanning is a child, but she is a wonderful actor. I don’t know what a child actor is. She’s an actor who’s a child.

Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.

I think all those actors from that generation, like Bogart – they were wonderful actors. They didn’t act. They just came on and they did it, and the characters were wonderful.

Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.

My mom always wanted me to be an actor. And I started going to theater and going on auditions young.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

To be honest, I never really considered myself to be too much of an actress. So, whenever I get the chance to do music, I’m always, like, just in it. It’s like, ‚Oh my God, I finally get to do this. I’m so happy.‘

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

I will not play just an evil part. In fact, I got offered $7 million several years ago to play the part that Faye Dunaway played in ‚Supergirl.‘ I was kind of insulted. I was impressed with the money, but I said, ‚Why are you asking me to play an evil witch? Do I come across as an evil witch to you?‘

I’m just a little kid from Akron.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

I’ve always loved the idea of playing Black Adam.

‚Leading man‘ just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.

No traveler, whether a tree lover or not, will ever forget his first walk in a sugar-pine forest. The majestic crowns approaching one another make a glorious canopy, through the feathery arches of which the sunbeams pour, silvering the needles and gilding the stately columns and the ground into a scene of enchantment.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

I can’t act!

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

I want to play a fireman and a spy. I want to learn special effects.

I like to hide behind the characters I play. Despite the public perception, I am a very private person who has a hard time with the fame thing.

It’s much more fun to play something you’re nothing like than what you are… It’s much easier to hide yourself in a character.

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

At some point in time, you definitely have to go drama. Not to say that you’re going drama just because everybody else does it. You do it to challenge yourself. You do it because, naturally, in the profession of acting, you want to show growth. You want to say that you take the craft seriously.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting.

My act is an exaggeration of a part of me. I’m much more expressive off stage.

I want to show audiences I can act.

Meryl and Katharine Hepburn are probably the two greatest actresses of this and the last century.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

I was asked to act when I couldn’t act. I was asked to sing ‚Funny Face‘ when I couldn’t sing, and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn’t dance – and do all kinds of things I wasn’t prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

Because we’re actors we can pretend and fake it, but I’d rather the intimate investment was authentic.

Religions in general have to rediscover their roots. In Hinduism and the Koran, animals are described as equals. If you walk into a cathedral and look at the decorations of early Christianity, there are vines, animals, creatures and birds thriving all over the stonework.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

I love performing, you know, because, like I say, I’m a ham for this stuff.

I wouldn’t use the word ‚scared‘ for my role as Hitchcock, but it was my most insecure. Taking on such a formidable, giant personality such as Hitchcock; he was one of the great geniuses of world cinema. Sheer genius.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

I’ve been fortunate. I don’t pick scripts. Scripts pick me.

I prefer directing to acting. There is huge freedom that comes from being behind the camera. It brings a lot of responsibilities as well but is intensely rewarding.

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

Actually, you have to be a little bit in love with your leading man and vice versa. If you’re going to portray love, you have to feel it. You can’t do it any other way. But you don’t carry it beyond the set.

Something I learned as an actor was which scenes needed to be rehearsed and which actors are good with rehearsal, which actors learn from it, and which ones grow stale because they start to second-guess themselves.