I'm very aware that when one is acting in the theater, you do become kind of animal about it. And you're reliant on instincts rather than tact a lot of the time.
Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.
When Levin thought what he was and what he was living for, he could find no answer to the questions and was reduced to despair; but when he left off questioning himself about it, it seemed as though he knew both what he was and what he was living for, acting and living resolutely and without hesitation.
A person who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he or she ought only to consider whether in doing anything he or she is doing right or wrong- acting the part of a good person or a bad person.
One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
A majority of women seem to consider themselves sent into the world for the sole purpose of displaying dry goods, and it is only when acting the part of an animated milliner's block that they feel they are performing their appropriate mission.
Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.
The physical stamina [in Revolution]. I was just shocked by it. I didn't think I had it in me ever, and I wasn't terribly young when I did it. I was in my early forties. That was the first thing I was struck by, not by the acting, not by anything else, but by the physicality.