Category: Comedy Books

I recently finished reading “Talent is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. Below are the quotes I found useful and applicable to the entertainment industry. As always, if you find the quotes useful, please read and buy the book.

“Many people not only fail to become outstandingly good at what they do, no matter how many years they spend doing it, they frequently don’t even get any better than they were when they started.” (3)

“Research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.” (4)

“If customer ignorance is a profit center for you, you’re in trouble.” (11)

“Today, in a change that is historically quite sudden, financial capital is abundant. The scarce resource is no longer money. It’s human ability.” (12)

“Being good at whatever we want to do is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know.” (16)

“One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.” (18)

“There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track’ for high achievers.” (19)

“Over and over, the researchers found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. “(23)

“IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.” (45)

“No matter who they were, or what explanation of their performance was being advanced, it always took them many years to become excellent, and if a person achieves elite status only after many years of toil, assigning the principal role in that success to innate gifts becomes problematic, to say the least.” (61)

“In math, science, musical composition, swimming, X-ray diagnosis, tennis, literature – no one, not even the most “talented” performers, became great without at least ten years of very hard preparation.” (62)

“Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual such as chess or business related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.” (66)

“Anyone who thinks they’ve outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view.” (67)

“At the driving range or at the piano, most of us, as adults, are just doing what we’ve done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.” (68)

“The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect.” (68)

“Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach. We can never make progress in the comfort zone because those are the activities we can already do easily; while panic-zone activities are so hard that we don’t even know how to approach them.” (69)

“Identifying the learning zone, which is not simple, and then forcing oneself to stay continually in it as it changes, which is even harder – these are the first and most important characteristics of deliberate practice.” (69)

“You can work on technique all you like, but if you can’t see the effects, two things will happen: You won’t get any better, and you’ll stop caring.” (70)

“Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see – or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted.” (71)

“The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people wont’ do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.” (72)

“Deliberate practice does not fully explain achievement – real life is too complicated for that. Most obviously, we’re all affected by luck; time and chance happeneth to us all.” (79)

“Genes could play a role in a person’s willingness to put himself or herself through the extremely rigorous demands of becoming an exceptional performer.” (81)

“Frequently when we see great performers doing what they do, it strikes us that they’ve practice for so long, and done it so many times, they can just do it automatically. But in fact, what they have achieved is the ability to avoid doing it automatically.” (82)

“Great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice – avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible.” (83)

“Practice is all about pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do.” (84)

“We can see mentors in a new way – not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we’re doing.” (109)

“The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but about the process of reaching the outcome.” (117)

“Too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.” (119)

“A mental model is never finished. Great performers not only possess highly developed mental models, they are also always expanding and revising those models.” (124)

“Understand that each person in the organization is not just doing a job, but is also being stretched and grown.” (128)

“Some of the worst teams I’ve ever seen have been those where everybody was a potential CEO,” says David Nadler. “If there’s a zero-sum game called succession going on, it’s very difficult to have an effective team.” (137)

“Reciprocal vulnerability is the beginning of trust. But the process can be rushed only so much.” (139)

“Just as great individual performers possess highly developed mental models of their domains, the best teams are composed of members who share a mental model – of the domain, and of how the team will be effective.” (141)

“In a world that forces that push toward the commoditization of everything, creating something new and different is the only way to survive. A product unlike any other can’t be commoditized. A service that reaches deep into the psyche of the buyer can never be purchased solely on price. Creating such products and services was always valuable; now it’s essential.” (146)

“As products and services live shorter lives, so do the business models of the companies that sell them.” (147)

“The most eminent creators are consistently those who have immersed themselves utterly in their chosen fields, have devoted their lives to it, amassed tremendous knowledge of it, and continually pushed themselves to the front of it.” (155)

“In many creative fields the person who pursues an advanced degree has consciously chosen a path that leads to a professorship, not to a life of innovating in that domain.” (156)

“Innovation doesn’t reject the past; on the contrary, it relies heavily on the past and comes most readily to those who’ve mastered the domain as it exists.” (157)

“People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money.” (164)

“Excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else – except in their field of expertise.” (180)

“The consistent finding reported by many researchers examining many domains is that high creative achievement and intrinsic motivation go together. Creative people are focused on the task (How can I solve this problem?) and not on themselves (What will solving this problem do for me?).” (189)

“The people who do become top-level achievers are rarely child prodigies.” (197)

If you want to read the whole book, you can buy it here.

I recently finished “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t” by Jim Collins and while it’s not directly related to being a comedian or working in the entertainment industry, I think a lot of the findings are very applicable anyway. As always, if you enjoy the quotes, please buy and read the full book.

“Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.” (1)

“The Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” (13)

“The Hedgehog Concept: To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. Just because something is your core business – just because you’ve been doing it for years or perhaps even decades – does not necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business absolutely cannot form the basis of a great company.” (13)

“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.” (14)\

“The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.” (16)

“I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.” – Darwin Smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark (20)

“The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.” (42)

“IF you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” (42)

“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” (56)

“The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems.” (59)

“Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.” (59)

“No matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.” (62)

“The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse.” (72)

“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.” (74)

“All good-to-great companies attained a very simple concept that they used as a frame of reference for all their decisions.” (95)

“Consider what you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at).” (95)

“You can be passionate all you want, but if you can’t be the best at it or it doesn’t make economic sense, then you might have a lot of fun, but you won’t produce great results.” (97)

“You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.” (109)

“You might wonder about what type of person gets all jazzed up about making a bank as efficient as McDonald’s, or who considers a diaper charismatic. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that they felt passionate about what they were doing and the passion was deep and genuine.” (110)

“It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.” (114)

“The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline – a problem that largely goes way if you have the right people in the first place.” (121)

“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turns drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increase the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.” (121)

“Good to great” lies in the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvement from there.” (128)

“Your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position.” (138)

““Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.” (143)

“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.” (152)

“You cannot make good use of technology until you know which technologies are relevant.” (153)

“Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.” (156)

“Technology cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster.” (158)

“Those who built the good-to-great companies weren’t motivated by fear. They weren’t driven by fear of what they didn’t understand. They weren’t drive by fear of looking like a chump. They weren’t driven by fear of watching others hit it big while they didn’t. they weren’t driven by the fear of being hammered by the competition. No, those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and a n inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.” (160)

“Lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.” (172)

“In a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.” (194)

“Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.” (195)

“It is much easier to become great than to remain great.” (204)

“The point is to realize that much of what we’re doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.” (205)

“Those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.” (208)

“if you’re doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It’s just a given.” (208)

“You don’t need to have some grand existential reason for why you love what you’re doing or to care deeply about your work (although yo might). All that matters is that you do love it and that you do care.” (209)

“The real question is no, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.” (209)

“In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. and it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.” (210)

“The single biggest danger in business and life, other than outright failure, is to be successful without being resolutely clear about why you are successful in the first place.” –Robert Burgelman, Stanford Professor (213)

“Fair or not, people – especially in the United States – can forgive a lot of sins, but will never forget or forgive feeling lied to.” (215)

“It is not the content of a company’s values that correlates with performance, but the strength of conviction with which it holds those values, whatever they might be.” (215)

“Widen your definition of “right people” to focus more on the character attributes of the person and less on specialized knowledge. People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.” (216)

”Take advantage of difficult economic times to hire great people, even if you don’t have a specific job in mind.” (217)

As always, if you enjoy the quotes, please buy and read the full book.

I recently finished reading “Process: An Improviser’s Journey” by Mary Scruggs and Michael Gellman. Here’s the quotes I found useful.

“You can save yourself from this slow, painful death by getting your focus off of yourself.” (xxii)

“I got that feeling of panic again, and I knew from experience that the best way to handle that feeling is to just start doing something.” (24)

“Stay in the moment. Don’t try to think up clever bits. Don’t feel responsible for creating the final product.” (41)

“When I do manage to exist in the present moment and the present moment only, I feel like I’ve brushed up against something eternal. I’ve touched the divine.” (42)

“What you do in normal life is not theater. Theater is compressed time and space, artificial dialogue, and heightened situations. It is our job as good actors to help the audience believe it’s real and natural. And I think it helps if we believe in the given circumstances ourselves. The more we commit to the character and the play, improvised or scripted, the better we are able to get to that place of the believable.” (64)

“When you follow the dialogue rules, you almost have to explore and heighten relationship.” (66)

“If there is no physical manifestation of your reaction to your discovery, does it exist for your audience?” (70)

“The fact that you can write is an asset – a tremendous asset. That’s why you’re so good at the dialogue rules. Just don’t get ahead of yourself when you’re improvising. React to what you see, taste, hear, touch, and smell – not to the story in your head.” (72)

“Having two points of concentration actually seemed to help me stay in the moment.” (74)

“We worry that we aren’t going to have an honest discovery, so we make up stories. Or if we actually manage to have a real discovery, we worry that our reaction to that discovery isn’t going to be enough.” (75)

“Dialogue comes after the reaction. The ashes after the fire. Don’t try to manufacture.” (86)

“To avoid getting into fights, only make ‘I’ statements. For example, ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ ‘I want,’ ‘I feel.’ (100)

“You are not responsible for the product. Only the process. Improvise moment to moment to moment, and the play will take care of itself.” (103)

“Acting is acting is acting, and if people believe we are who we say we are, it is considered to be good acting.” (140)

If you found these quotes useful, please buy and read the book here.

I recently finished reading “On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director” by Alexander Mackendrick. Here’s the quotes I found interesting:

“Since the money we are gambling is mostly the business men’s, the least we can do is to act as if we were reliable and responsible characters: not artists but craftsmen, highly paid craftsmen who can be guaranteed to turn out goods of standard quality.” (xix)

“‘Creativity’ will always look after itself if you are prolific in production, which means starting off by turning out masses of work that is relatively unoriginal, derivative and imitative. When productivity has become second nature, you will find you have acquired a freedom in which your particular and personal individuality emerges of its own accord.” (xxiii)

“His response to our work was so incredibly un-lazy and passionate, and there was always a kind of warning bell that I heard whenever I was with him. To me it rang: ‘I am the writer and director of films you are still watching thirty years after I made them. The determination and commitment I have shown is something you will need if you are to in the world I have left behind.’” (xxiv)

“Film is not just something up there on the screen – it’s a happening in your head.” (xxxv)

“The value of any ‘rule’ is not apparent until you have studied the exception to it.” (xxxvii)

“Cinema is not so much non-verbal as pre-verbal.” (3)

“Hitchcock is suggesting that a good film should be ninety per cent understandable even if dubbed into a language no one sitting in the auditorium understands.” (4)

“Exposition in film is much more interesting after the dramatic event as a comment (or perhaps explanation) on it.” (6)

“If the only purpose of dialogue is to provide expository information to the characters in the scene but to the audience, it is boring.” (22)

“The comic figure is a caricature who cannot feel too much pain and whose emotions are simplified to the point of absurdity.” (34)

“Screenplays are not written, they are REWRITTEN and REWRITTEN and REWRITTEN.” (40)

“Use coincidence to get characters into trouble, not out of trouble.” (41)

“If you’ve got a Beginning, but you don’t yet have an end, then you’re mistaken. You don’t have the right Beginning.” (42)

“Character progression: When you’ve thought out what kind of character your protagonist will be at the end, start him or her as the opposite kind of person at the beginning.” (42)

“Anything that can be cut should be, because when everything non-essential is eliminated, what remains is greatly strengthened.” (46)

“Imagine yourself in the role of this antagonist. Begin to write an interior monologue in the first person, an account of the story as seen through the eyes of this antagonist.” (52)

“Choice of a story’s point of view very often determines the theme.”

“Every screenplay that finally became a film was rewritten a minimum of five and a maximum of seven times.” (58)

“Don’t wait to get it right, just get it written.” (58)

“A character is a personification of a point of view.” (58)

“A weakness in the third act is not just a weakness of the end of the screenplay, it is a fundamental weakness of the whole work.” (60)

“One of the writer’s jobs is to be the connection between two other personalities: the director speaking the film ‘language’ and the performer discovering the role.” (66)

“I urge you to avoid introducing technical jargon that is meant to demonstrate your acquaintance with problems of production for these things are not your business. While the impulse of a good director will be to scratch it all out, it also clearly indicates to the producer that you are a bumbling amateur.” (72)

“Professional screenplay shave a quality in common with good journalism: they use the minimum number of words to communicate the maximum information. A good screenplay must be not only easy to read, it should be easy to read fast.” (73)

“I find it useful to think of the audience as the enemy, to try to tell the story while always remembering that the audience has somewhere better to go and something better to do.” (77)

“A story can quickly become monotonous if tension is constant.” (80)

“They say that the most thoroughly deranged people are those who act in an utterly logical way, except that this logic is based on one insane premise.” (115)

“A line that reads quite implausibly on the printed page can be quite convincing and effective when spoken in a throwaway or incidental fashion by the actor.” (121)

“Dramatic economy, which includes the ability of the writer to cut what at one point he might have considered to be his best work ever, is one of the most important skills a writer can have, learned only through much experience, combined with a ruthless attitude and an utter lack of sentimentality. It takes effort, lots of effort. It means rewriting and rewriting and rewriting – a constant process of distillation.” (125)

“When a writing dilemma appears insoluble, it is not a bad tactic to push it deliberately out of your consciousness while you go off on other business, or indeed play.” (162)

“The first step in all dramatic writing is visual.” (165)

“It is the task of the writer and director to find some way of making character-action believable.” (166)

“The actor must decide what the character is saying to himself at all times, as if he were writing a continuous inner soliloquy that expresses his character’s thoughts, responses and attitudes. An actor who has mastered a role is able to speak this soliloquy out loud. He is, at all times, able to answer the question ‘What is this character really trying to say with his line?’ (even if his character is not). In this way, subtext can develop during rehearsal, quite unconsciously, as a way of controlling the inflections of words, the timing of gestures, and the length of silences.” (182)

“If you avoid eye contact by looking only during those brief instants when you have a real need to see seomthing, then your mind is constantly at work. Thus to scrutinize an object with extreme concentration, you must keep the focus of your attention in constant motion.” (184)

“Try the fixed look at your partner again but now keep the look moving from the mouth to the yes, the left eye to the right, the eyebrows to the chin. This will, on film at least, appear as a fixed concentration of your attention.” (184)

“A screen actor’s performance is likely to be much more useful to the director and the editor if his looks are no sustained but are rather a series of sharply defined flicks of the eye to check for information.” (185)

“The character who is ‘almost angry but a bit pitying’ will achieve this effect with more vitality if he shows an impulse to anger, quickly checked by a contradictory moment of pity, then by another flash of annoyance. If the girl who is resentful but intrigued alternates between moments of resentment and moments of interest, it is much clearer for the audience.” (187)

“This is perhaps the primary function of the director: to provide his actors with the same kind of support and stimulus the stage actor gets during a live performance.” (189)

“This is the reason why, in the vast majority of cases, the director who demonstrates to the actor by acting the role himself, by reading the line of dialogue for the actor to mimic or by performing the gesture so that the actor can copy it, has already failed.” (190)

“One of the most helpful things the director can do is invite the actor to improvise scenes that do not appear in the script but that in narrative terms have taken place just before the scene that is being presently explored.” (191)

“Questions are often more helpful to the actor than any answers the director might be able to offer (a good example being something like, ‘What happened to your character after the last scene and before this one?’). (191)

“A director contributes not by instructing the actor but by inspiring him.” (191)

“Every entrance is an exit from a previous situation and every exit is an entrance to somewhere else. Indeed, if this is not the case you should ask yourself whether or not the scene is necessary.” (193)

“You should know your story so completely that there is no question any actor can ask you about a character (including aspects of off-screen life and back-story) for which you cannot instantly improvise a convincing answer.” (193)

“The way to make a cut seem smooth is to make the jump of the mind’s eye one that the audience wants to make.” (199)

“The motivation for every cut should always be built into the preceding angle.” (199)

“It might not be too much to say that what a film director really directs is his audience’s attention.” (200)

“Making something eye-catching is not always a matter of making it bigger. Rather, it is about being that little bit different form everything else.” (201)

“We see the start of every action, then cut away and almost immediately reintroduce the action at a more advanced stage. It will appear to the audience as though it is all one uninterrupted process.” (211)

“A scene that involves very complicated and expensive logistics, crowds, special effects and elaborate production design can very profitably be planned in very precise detail beforehand. But if you are working on a scene with a lot of dialogue and the possibility of complex movements of actors during a sustained scene, it can be a mistake to plan the camera set-ups in advance in any rigid way.” (218)

“If one character is seen in close-up and the other in medium shot, our feelings of sympathy and/or identification are with the figure seen at the closer distance.” (225)

“IF one character is on screen for longer than another, and especially if edits are timed to capture the thoughts of that character, then the scene will often appear to be from his or her point of view.” (225)

“When cutting from a long-shot to a closer angle, it is generally a good idea to change the angle.” (249)

“When the edit is equivalent of a visual enlargement of the preceding picture, the problem is likely to be that we do not really see anything we haven’t already seen.” (249)

“If suspense is aimed for, the spectator must first be shown what to wait for. If a shock is intended, the pre-warning must be, so to speak, negative: the spectator must be deliberately led away from the significant event before it can come to him as a surprise.” (254)

“When editing, don’t try to preserve every aspect of both performances.” (256)

“Once the audience understands what is about to happen, when the impulse to act is clear, it’s time to make your cut, so the audience is able to see the consequences of that action.” (256)

“It makes good sense to begin by shooting the master-shot of a scene, even if it is not the first shot in continuity.” (260)

“When shooting a scene, always ask yourself, ‘If I was allowed only one close-up, where would it be and which character would it feature?’” (260)

“The experienced director will line up the closer angle with the actors in position and then instruct them to step out of the frame and move into position only after the camera is rolling.” (260)

“Theory will not usually help you to do work that is good, though it may be of some help to identify your mistakes, and thus can sometimes be useful for corrective purposes.” (289)

If you found these quotes helpful, please buy and read the book here.

I recently finished reading “True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor” by David Mamet. Here’s the quotes I found useful/interesting.

“It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to a craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.” (18)

“Part of the requirement of a life in the theatre is to stay out of school.” (18)

“The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.” (19)

“If you want to be in the theatre, go into the theatre. If you want to have made a valiant effort to go into the theatre before you go into real estate or law school or marry wealth, then perhaps you should stay in school.” (19)

“The study of acting consists in the main of getting out of one’s own way, and in learning to deal with uncertainty and being comfortable being uncomfortable.” (20)

“The actor has his own trials to undergo, and they are right in front of him. They don’t have to be super added; they exist. His challenge is not to recapitulate, to pretend to the difficulties of the written character; it is to open the mouth, stand straight, and say the words bravely – adding nothing, denying nothing, and without the intent to manipulate anyone: himself, his fellows, the audience.” (22)

“Find your mark, look the other fellow in the eye, and tell the truth.” –James Cagney (25)

“It is the audience that goes to the theatre to exercise its emotion – not the actor, the audience. And when they go, having paid to be moved, they exercise their right to their money’s worth.” (25)

“The actor creates excuses not to act and attributes her reluctance to everything in the world except the actual cause.” (29)

“Nobody cares how hard you worked. Nor should they.” (32)

“Any worthwhile goal is difficult to accomplish. To say of it “I’ll try” is to excuse oneself in advance.” (34)

“Those with “something to fall back on” invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it.” (34)

“Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?” (35)

“One could also say, “I see nothing else worth my time,” which is, I think, a rather strengthening attitude.” (35)

“It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.” (41)

“To serve in the real theatre, one needs to be able to please the audience and the audience only.” (42)

“The opinion of teachers and peers is skewed, and too much time spent earning their good opinion unfits one for a life upon the stage.” (42)

“You will not please either yourself or others in every aspect of every outing.” (48)

“They come to the show to be pleased, and they will be pleased by the honest, the straightforward, the unusual, the intuitive – all those things, in short, which dismay both the teacher and the casting agent.” (50)

“You have an enormously greater chance of eventually presenting yourself to, and eventually appealing to, an audience by striking out on your own, by making your own plays and films, than by submitting to the industrial model of the school and the studio.” (51)

“The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.” (56)

“Here, again, is your job: learn the lines, find a simple objective like that indicated by the author, speak the lines clearly in an attempt to achieve that objective.” (57)

“It is not necessary to believe anything in order to act.” (57)

“You have to learn the lines, look at the script simply to find a simple action for each scene, and then go out there and do your best to accomplish that action, and while you do, simply open your mouth and let the words come out however they will.” (62)

“For to you, to the actor, it is not the words which carry the meaning – it is the actions.” (62)

“What matters is what you mean. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. The rest is Funny Voices.” (63)

“Two things should happen in the rehearsal process: 1. The play should be blocked 2. The actors should become acquainted with the actions they are going to perform.” (72)

“An action is the attempt to accomplish something.” (72)

“Each character in the play wants something. It is the actor’s job to reduce that something to its lowest common denominator and then act upon it.” (74)

“The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.” (75)

“The boxer has to fight one round at a time; the fight will unfold as it is going to. The boxer takes a simple plan into the ring, and then has to deal with the moment. So do you. The correct unit of application is the scene.” (76)

“The greatest performances are seldom noticed. Why? Because they do not draw attention to themselves, and do not seek to – like any real heroism, they are simple and unassuming, and seem to be a natural and inevitable outgrowth of the actor.” (79)

“If we devote ourselves to the punchline, all else becomes clear. The punchline is the action.” (83)

“You don’t have to become more interesting, more sensitive, more talented, more observant – to act better. You do have to become more active.” (84)

“Nobody with a happy childhood ever went into show business.” (87)

“Your concentration is always like water. It will always seek its own level – it will always flow to the most interesting thing around.” (94)

“The more you are concerned with yourself, the less you are worthy of note.” (95)

“The more a persons’ concentration is outward, the more naturally interesting that person becomes.” (95)

“It’s not your responsibility to do things in an interesting manner – to become interesting. You are interesting. It’s your responsibility to become outward-directed.” (95)

“Why not direct yourself toward the actions of the play? If they are concrete, provocative, and fun, it will be no task at all to do them; and to do them is more interesting than to concentrate on them.” (95)

“No one wants to pay god money and irreplaceable time to watch you be responsible. They want to watch you be exciting.” (97)

“Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.” (99)

“Leave the concerns of the street on the street. And when you leave the theatre, leave that performance behind you. It’s over – if there is something you want to do differently next time, do it.” (102)

“If you decide to be an actor, stick to your decision. The folks you meet in supposed positions of authority – critics, teachers, casting directors – will, in the main, be your intellectual and moral inferiors. They will lack your imagination, which is why they became bureaucrats rather than artists; and they will lack your fortitude, have elected institutional support over a life of self-reliance. They spend their lives learning lessons very different from the ones you learn, and many or most of them will envy you and this envy will express itself as contempt. It’s a cheap trick of unhappy people, and if you understand it for what it is, you need not adopt or be overly saddened by their view of you. It is the view of the folks on the veranda talking about the lazy slaves.” (110)

“You don’t have to portray the hero or the villain. That’s been done for you by the script.” (114)

“Most of us have learned something from a teacher. But I doubt if anyone ever learned anything from an Educator.” (122)

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