I played Othello, but I didn’t sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn’t do me any good.

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

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

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

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. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.

Acting is the most minor of gifts. After all, Shirley Temple could do it when she was four.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up.

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.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw’s plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

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.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.

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.

So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

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

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

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

I’m proud to be an actor. See, as an actor, you live longer. Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

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

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

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

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

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.

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

I like talking. I like acting.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

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

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

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

Whatever is on the page is what I’m married to. I’m very prepared. I’m a thespian. I don’t like to improv. I don’t like to go off course ‚cause I think that’s where stuff happens. When you stick to the material ‚cause it’s written so well, that’s where the magic happens.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

It’s very rare that you get a director that lets you be creative and bring what you feel your character should do or should be.

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.

Every time I try to retire, or even think of retiring from acting, my agent comes up with a script.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

I got started as an actor when I was 12.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

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

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.

I play a nobody in Japan.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

Acting is the perfect idiot’s profession.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

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.

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 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.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

I have an immense amount of respect for acting. I’ve always loved movies and was always fascinated by movie-making. But to become an actor, I wanted to commit myself.

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

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?