Stella Adler Quotes

Acting can be the healthiest profession in the world, because it allows you to do things you can't do in real life. It allows you to understand more than just what life provides you.

You will fail. That's great. Here's a secret for you - that's the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something. If you fail but learn something from your failure, you will grow.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

The play is not in the words, it's in you!

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.

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen.

Acting is in everything but the words.

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.

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.

We are in danger, all of us, and I will give you an example why - a journalist I knew years ago. He was a good journalist. He went around the world and recorded what he saw and came to various conclusions. He said, Paris is this and London is that - and Greece is worth a couple of days. He felt two days was enough to give him an understanding of Greece. What that statement reveals is that the basis of our Western culture now, and of professional man, is middle-class. The middle class makes statements and knows nothing. You and I are the middle class and must think of ourselves as middle-class. We are middleclass actors, middle-class journalists, middle-class plumbers and morticians. The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen.

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.

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.

Your talent is in your choice.

The actor must be full of passion. If he's too cool he's better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.

Life in the theatre isn't necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn't when you sign a contract. It isn't even when you are in a play. It's when you understand it. If you understand it, you'll know why you want to act.

You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

We dress the way we think.

Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring.

An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong.

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

The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.

Acting is reacting.

Actors today think that being true is being nice, or being some other "set" thing. That is not the truth. That is your miserable habit of boring everybody to death.

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

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.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one

The only excuse for not coming to a class or a performance is death.

The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement.

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

To grow: that is your deepest and truest need when you say, 'I want to be an actor.'

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

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.

The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.

You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.

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.

Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively.