Stella Adler Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. 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. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

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

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

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

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

Stella Adler
Your talent is in your imagination. The rest is lice.

Stella Adler
It takes three things to make it in this business: the tenacity of a bulldog, the hide of a rhinoceros and a good home to come home to.

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

Stella Adler
You can't be boring. Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring.

Stella Adler
You must get away from the real thing because the real thing will limit your acting and cripple you. To think of your own mother's death each time you want to cry onstage is schizophrenic and sick.

Stella Adler
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

Stella Adler
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