If you want to be a screenwriter, take an acting class to get a sense of what you're asking actors to do. Learning other skills will help you communicate with people and respect what they do.

Acting is a career where you keep learning with every film you do.

Never stand still. Only stand still enough to learn, and once you stop learning in that stance, move off. Always keep yourself engaged, in theater, in whatever job you can get. If you can't get an acting job, then go backstage. Or take tickets. But be around actors because that is where you will primarily learn.

I think you need to be intentional at times about your leadership - where you're eating lunch, who you're interacting with, making guys feel like you're interested in what they're doing. If it's authentic, then it's going to be an easy conversation and easy hangout time.

Leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting and, most importantly, a way of communicating.

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

My work requires acting at its most committed - it demands actors of enormous resilience, but also intelligence and wit. It doesn't work for narcissistic or selfish actors.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

With acting, there's a certain amount of independence you have within the framework of the storytelling. When it's done well, it's a collaborative medium.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

There's no great mystery to acting. It's a very simple thing to do but you have to work hard at it. It's about asking questions and using your imagination.

On 'Into The Wild' I spent months risking my life and on 'Speed Racer' I spent 60 days acting in front of a green screen. No danger to my physical self, but I sure had to use my imagination.

I surrendered to a world of my imagination, reenacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare.

Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.

The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.

You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination.

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

Acting is an expression of imagination. No firsthand knowledge is necessary.

It's almost like living a double life where I'm in a limbo space where Amanda Knox, a real person, exists, 'Foxy Knoxy,' an idea of a person, exists, and I'm constantly having to juggle how someone is interacting with me based upon that two-dimensional person of me that has been in the public's imagination for so long.

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

I find any sort of acting that doesn't have any humor in it is mind-numbingly boring.