Michael Shurtleff Quotes

The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.

Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.

Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.

Consistency is the death of good acting.

To go into acting is like asking for admission to an insane asylum. Anyone may apply, but only the certifiably insane are admitted.

The moral: Don't settle for anything less than the biggest dream for your future Fight to make the dream come true.

Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.

Every scene is a love scene. The actor should ask the question: 'Where is the love?'

An expression of feeling isn't worth anything unless it interferes with what the other actor in the scene wants.

Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.

Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street Bridge.

Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.

Take nothing for granted. Make an emotional discovery as often as you can find one in every scene. Ask yourself: What is new?

Most actors make themselves unhappy by searching for their sanity, by insisting on their normalcy; it's a grave mistake.

Competition [in a scene] is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don't want to compete. They want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors.

The actor needs to find out what the basic fight is in every character in every scene.

There's only one reason why a character drinks: to seek confrontation. To fight for what they want in ways normally denied them.

The life of an actor is a bit easier to take if you admit you're bonkers.

Everyone thinks romance is weak. Yet romance is everyone's secret dream-it's why we're alive.

That's why there's so little romance in our world now: everyone thinks romance is weak.

Humor is an attitude, a survivor’s way of looking at life. It’s not about telling jokes.

If we lived for reality, we'd be dead, every last one of us. Only dreams keep us going.