Acting: An art which consists of keeping the audience from coughing.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.

The most precious things in speech are the pauses.

If a man without a sense of smell declared that this yellow rose that I hold had no scent, we should know that he is wrong. The defect is in him, not the flower. It is the same with the man who says there is no God. It merely means that he is without the capacity to discern His presence.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

Dead? No excuse for laying off work.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

I like talking to engineers best. They built bridges, they're very precise, very disciplined, yet I find they have roving minds.