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.

Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.

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.

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.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

Plagiarism is always the biggest thing in Hollywood.

I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

I sure lost my musical direction in Hollywood. My songs were the same conveyer belt mass production, just like most of my movies were.

I didn’t come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it’s sickening.

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

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood.

I never wanted to stay in one genre; I never wanted to be pigeon-holed or defined as the actor who only worked in one genre. I want to be able to work in all different genres. For me it’s fun, and that’s how I grow as an actor.

When you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up. Once you get to the point where Hollywood sees that you create results, then the demand for you becomes higher.

I like talking. I like acting.

It’s really fun to put yourself into a character – into shoes you wouldn’t normally be in.

It is no surprise that animation is Hollywood’s most successful and innovative genre.

I was born to play Hercules. I have loved and honored the mythology over the years – since I was a kid. When I first broke into Hollywood, ‚Hercules‘ was one of the movies that I – not chased, because I didn’t have the power to chase anything – but always had in the back of my mind.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

When I was a kid, I loved Elvis, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. But I had no connection to Hollywood – and being a movie star was such a far-fetched idea, growing up in Hawaii.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

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.

To be honest with you, when I got into this I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me. I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

Acting is happy agony.

I think the form, the Hollywood movie, I think the quality is obviously always going to be there and I think that the question of taste, there’s always a question of taste.

Hollywood has a way of making everything seem like an overnight success.

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.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

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.

If I close my eyes and think of Hollywood, all I see is one big varicose vein.

Later on they send me to Hollywood. To make movies. It was all new to me. I was only 21 years old.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

I was acting when I was playing baseball.

On ‚Think Like a Man,‘ they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

What I do is just go over and over and over my lines and learn the script so well that I can just be easy and relaxed. That’s the way I always work.

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

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

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.

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

When I got into this, I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me, I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

I’ve been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn’t starving; I was going to eat the next day.

In the past when I was in Hollywood, I was like a dog. I felt humiliated. My English was not good. People would even ask me ‚Jackie Who?‘.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

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

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.

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

In Hollywood, a lot of times when something is in development, it just takes a lot of time.

I think that people are interested seeing me on the screen.

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!

I think the whole stigma of ‚black movies‘ is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like ’12 Years A Slave,‘ to ‚The Butler,‘ to ‚The Best Man,‘ to ‚Ride Along,‘ to even ‚Think Like a Man‘ from last year – these movies are just good movies.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

A lot of artists fail when they try to act, and they flop. So when I get into acting, it’s going to be to do it well, something good, something of quality. I want people to say, ‚Wow, that movie‘ – or that show or whatever – ‚turned out really well.‘

I’ve always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, ‚Hi,‘ that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

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.

In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.