Stella Adler Quotes & Sayings

The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind. — Stella Adler

Tell yourself that the world is outside, that it's not to be hidden from you, that you are going to thrust yourself forward and be relaxed in the world. You have chosen a field where you're going to be hurt to the blood. But to retreat from the pain is death — Stella Adler

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. — Stella Adler

It's not enough to have talent. You have to have a talent for your talent. — Stella Adler

You'll never really be great unless you aim high. — Stella Adler

Don't use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little. — Stella Adler

You have to do something. If you do something, you become somebody. Even a daffodil does something, has a profession. It gives off scent, professionally. — Stella Adler

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five. — Stella Adler

By taking elements you observe in life, you can develop qualities in your acting life that you don't ordinarily call upon in your personal life. — Stella Adler

Acting is reacting. — Stella Adler

An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong. — Stella Adler

Acting is in everything but the words. — Stella Adler

Emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt the feelings. — Stella Adler

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself. — Stella Adler

In life, as on the stage, it's not who I am but what I do that's the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit. — Stella Adler

The only excuse for not coming to a class or a performance is death. — Stella Adler

The thing that makes you say, "I want to do something" - that is the beginning of talent. — Stella Adler

Your talent is in your choice. — Stella Adler

Your curse is that you have chosen a form that requires endless study ... It means you have to read, you have to observe, you have to think, so that when you turn your imagination on, it has the fuel to do its job. — Stella Adler

Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous. — Stella Adler

Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring. — Stella Adler

You have to understand your best. Your best isn't Barrymore's best or Olivier's best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don't need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst. — Stella Adler

You should want to act only because you want to be led to something bigger in life. — Stella Adler

You cannot afford to confine your studies to the classroom. The universe and all of history is your classroom. — Stella Adler

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need. — Stella Adler

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good. — Stella Adler

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one — Stella Adler

When an acting teacher tells a student 'that wasn't honest work' or 'that didn't seem real,' what does this mean? In life, we are rarely 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. And characters in plays are almost never 'truthful' or 'honest' or 'real'. What exactly do teachers even mean by these words? A more useful question is: What is the story the actor was telling in their work? An actor is always telling a story. We all are telling stories, all the time. Story: that is what it is all about. — Stella Adler

You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. — Stella Adler

Acting can be the healthiest profession in the world, because it allows you to do things you can't do in real life. It allows you to understand more than just what life provides you. — Stella Adler

Our heritage as actors goes back thousands of years, and we have to feel as comfortable in the clothes, and the language of Sophocles as we do in our sneakers. — Stella Adler

We dress the way we think. — Stella Adler

Life in the theatre isn't necessarily when you get money from performing. It isn't when you sign a contract. It isn't even when you are in a play. It's when you understand it. If you understand it, you'll know why you want to act. — Stella Adler

Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you. — Stella Adler

The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation. — Stella Adler

You will fail. That's great. Here's a secret for you - that's the only way you can learn. Learning has to cost you something. If you fail but learn something from your failure, you will grow. — Stella Adler

Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word. — Stella Adler

Actors today think that being true is being nice, or being some other "set" thing. That is not the truth. That is your miserable habit of boring everybody to death. — Stella Adler

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap. — Stella Adler

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time. — Stella Adler

When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all. — Stella Adler

The play is not in the words, it's in you! — Stella Adler

The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit. — Stella Adler

To grow: that is your deepest and truest need when you say, 'I want to be an actor.' — Stella Adler

Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively. — Stella Adler

We are in danger, all of us, and I will give you an example why - a journalist I knew years ago. He was a good journalist. He went around the world and recorded what he saw and came to various conclusions. He said, Paris is this and London is that - and Greece is worth a couple of days. He felt two days was enough to give him an understanding of Greece. What that statement reveals is that the basis of our Western culture now, and of professional man, is middle-class. The middle class makes statements and knows nothing. You and I are the middle class and must think of ourselves as middle-class. We are middleclass actors, middle-class journalists, middle-class plumbers and morticians. The creation of the modern theater took a genius like Ibsen. — Stella Adler

Today the influences of your society pressure you to be successful before your time. They are pulling you down. They have pulled you down, you big, sweet, magnificent, young, potential artists. They have pulled you down so far that you are on the verge of destruction. Only you don't know it because you want to be a success — Stella Adler

Happy children should not try to be artists. You have to be born with a broken heart and a sense of loneliness inside. I never had a happy moment as a child myself. — Stella Adler

The ultimate aim of the training is to create an actor who can be responsible for his artistic development and achievement. — Stella Adler

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously. — Stella Adler

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors. — Stella Adler

The actor must be full of passion. If he's too cool he's better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage. — Stella Adler

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing. — Stella Adler

It's not important to know who you are. It's important to know what you do, and then to do it like hercules! — Stella Adler

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable. — Stella Adler

I would live in a communist country providing I was the Queen. — Stella Adler

The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays. — Stella Adler

You act with your soul. That's why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life. — Stella Adler

When you stand on the stage you must have a sense that you are addressing the whole world, and that what you say is so important the whole world must listen. — Stella Adler