Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you acting with your entire soul.

I believe that being an actress or being involved in a movie has to be a life experience otherwise why go for it? I have to change me and I have to learn things and I have to push me and my limits. By acting I find a freedom inside of a prison in a way.

Film is such a bizarre vehicle for acting. It's such a bizarre experience. I don't think you ever really get familiar with it. If you do get familiar with it you're probably not that good anymore.

Acting can be a narrow and isolated experience because you only examine your particular part.

I wouldn't go up on a stage now if you paid a thousand dollars for one minute of acting. It's a nasty experience. You're up there all by yourself. You're so damn exposed.

I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.

The wonderful thing about acting is you move along with your decade. The older you get the more interesting the parts you get to play and you bring more of your personal experience to the part.

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

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus with the flash of one hurried glance it attained to the vision of That Which Is.

I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an actor. I never even thought about other careers. The acting field is certainly not the path many Indian parents encourage their children to take but mine were very supportive. They wanted me to have an education but understood that this is what I wanted to do.

I use every single thing that Alfred Hitchcock taught me in my acting career... I am very grateful for the education he gave me in making motion pictures.

I recognize that I have a unique position to be a role model to young girls because I am doing something that they consider glamorous which is acting and yet I took a time to really get my education and study mathematics and I think math is the cat's meow.

I was always a closet lover of acting. My mom was very practical. She never ever restricted our dreams always told us we could do or be anything. Then I said 'Maybe I want to be an actor'. And she said 'Maybe not that'.

This city can be kind of brutal so you see your dreams from every different angle but ultimately it's about acting and if you enjoy acting you will always enjoy acting.

When I was a kid I wanted to be serious like Daniel Day-Lewis. No one really dreams of being a comic actor do they? Now I realise how stupid that is - and it's because comic acting isn't taken seriously enough. It's a discipline. You know instantly - either you're funny and getting the laughs or you're not.

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

Acting is also working with people who invite you into their dreams and trust you with their innermost being.

My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent I have reached the top of the acting profession.

I'm an artist. So if acting doesn't work out which I hope it does I'm probably going to go into graphic design or something like that.

I decided to go to school for advertising and graphic design. That was what I was gonna do but acting is that thing it's like a splinter in your mind and you can't get rid of it. So I decided to move to L.A. a few years ago and it just snowballed into this thing called 'The Hunger Games.'

Acting isn't for me. I don't like being told what to do. I'm more interested in set design more visually driven.

In any case his judgment and set of values acting alone or through his assistants determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant and what is not.

I was very interested in theatre mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.