All art is autobiographical – if it’s not, it’s not going to quicken on-stage, and it’s not going to come alive.

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings – the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.

Gratuitous cruelty borders on the pathological, psychotic and that becomes uninteresting because there is no choice.

In talking about a genius, you would not say that he lies; he sees realities with different eyes from ours.

I was born an ordinary actor. I will die an ordinary actor. But I’ve persisted.

Don’t go so deep in yourself that you no longer exist for your partner and for the character and for the play.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

The direct effect on our mind is achieved by the words, the text, the thought, which arouse consideration. Our will is directly affected by the super-objective, by other objectives, by a through line of action. Our feelings are directly worked upon by tempo-rhythm.

If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.