"Great Acting always dances with danger!" - Robert Cohen

"Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience." - Larry Moss

"Study, find all the good teachers and study with them, get involved in acting to act, not to be famous or for the money. Do plays. It's not worth it if you are just in it for the money. You have to love it." - Philip Seymour Hoffman

"Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." - Jean Cocteau

"The inner life of the imagination, and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself." - Michael Chekhov

[Human beings] will begin to recover the moment we take art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money." - Ernst Levy

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - Scott Adams

“Haven’t we noticed that the less talented the person is, the earlier he forms his “convictions” and the longer he tenaciously clings to them?” Michael Chekhov

"All great art comes from a sense of outrage." - Glenn Close

"Theatre, in which actors take on changing roles, has among its many functions the examination of identity. For the individual, theatre is a kind of identity laboratory in which social roles can be examined vicariously." - Richard Hornby

“With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.” - Johnny Depp

"If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. [You must] reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience." - Jack Lemon

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist." - Oscar Wilde

"An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama. We are taught to avoid trouble [so] actors don't realize they must go looking for it. Plays are written about...the extraordinary, the unusual, the climaxes. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance." - Michael Shurtleff

"An actor is totally vulnerable. His total personality is exposed to critical judgment - his intellect, his bearing, his diction, his whole appearance. In short, his ego." - Alec Guinness