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An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I've been playing around with cigarettes.

Melissa Leo
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I have some close friends I keep in touch with. I knit. I watch a little too much TV. I ski, if the weather's right for that. If I can find a group of buddies, I go rock climbing.
Melissa Leo
That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.
Melissa Leo
I am a smoker, I'm ashamed to say. I had given it up for many years, then picked it up again. It's a horrible habit. I struggle with myself all the time. And I love to smoke.
Melissa Leo
An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I've been playing around with cigarettes.
Melissa Leo
Being an actor on a movie set is like going to the playground at recess.
Melissa Leo
The climate informs the character.
Melissa Leo
There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.
Melissa Leo
The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is.
Melissa Leo
Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.
Melissa Leo
An actor's life is fairly lonely.
Melissa Leo
I haven't had a lot of experience with glamour. I've never had to mask myself, as many now not-so-young actresses have had to do. Female actors in that regard have a different lot in life than male actors.
Melissa Leo
I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.
Melissa Leo
I think the funny thing about acting for me - and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way - not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it's that important to me - is that it is an ancient healing art.
Melissa Leo
I think there has only been one time in my entire career that I've ever gone back to shoot a scene. And it was a scene that, when we were shooting it, we knew that it wasn't working. We knew there was a disagreement between the actor and director. So, we went back.
Melissa Leo
I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody's way.
Melissa Leo
I'm a very lucky girl who gets to act for a living! So why sit around griping and grousing about what's not there.
Melissa Leo
I'm not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director or actor-director.
Melissa Leo
I'm very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor.
Melissa Leo
People often expect me to be something other than what I am.
Melissa Leo
Supporting actors are the support. You can't make a building without support. You can't buy dinner without support.
Melissa Leo
The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.
Melissa Leo
Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.
Melissa Leo
To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.
Melissa Leo
To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.
Melissa Leo
Well, I don't think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that's going to shut down the world.
Melissa Leo
You know, when I got started on television in the '80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a shoulder bag.
Melissa Leo
It was always part of the plan to move into acting.
Aaliyah
Be where the acting is. I live in Houston. Dallas is 4 1/2 hours away. I let them know there's no difference.
Vic Mignogna
My mother keeps things in perspective for me. She makes me realize that the acting I do and love is no more important than what one of my brothers does-he works in a shoe repair shop. If my career ever tapers off, I'll go to college.
Dana Hill
In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.
Bela Lugosi
I think acting is about forgetting yourself in order to give the best of yourself. It's passing through you more than you're creating it. You're not the flower, but the vase which holds the flower.
Juliette Binoche
In LA, too many people want to go the quickest route from A to B. Method acting offers them that.
Corin Nemec
I don't see it as a form of healing, because if you have wounds that are bleeding I don't think acting will ever get them to stop. But I find acting is a form of illumination.
Rebecca De Mornay
Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.
Alan Ladd
I know that if I'd had to go and take an exam for acting, I wouldn't have got anywhere. You don't take exams for acting, you take your courage.
Dame Edith Evans
I'm not acting, but I am acting.
Tracey Gold
I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.
Jessica Hahn
I had a bonding problem when I went off and boxed for five years. I was over in Europe and Asia fighting because I wanted to do something different; I was tired of acting. But the thing is, when I was done doing that, I couldn't get a job.
Mickey Rourke
Acting for me is not that quid pro quo.
Tom Wilkinson
If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.
Jesse Eisenberg
When I was a kid, the idea of why I wanted acting to be the thing I do for the rest of my life was different. It was, Oh yeah, I'll get girls and be famous.
Edward Furlong
And then, I suppose, there's also a cinematic reality on top of that. Because it was extremely difficult to keep tabs on, it was quite confusing acting that.
Gabriel Byrne
I read. It's also nice for me to get involved in schoolwork, which is a totally different world than acting. It makes me feel like I am doing things that normal people are doing at my age.
Monica Keena
It's a living, breathing thing, acting.
Frank Langella
A few nights ago I went to a Hollywood screening of a small independent film made by Sally Kirkland, an old friend of mine who also did terrific job acting in it. There were other actors in it and they were all terrific.
Nick Mancuso
Plastic surgery and breast implants are fine for people who want that, if it makes them feel better about who they are. But, it makes these people, actors especially, fantasy figures for a fantasy world. Acting is about being real being honest.
Kate Winslet
I don't see my dancing or acting as two separate things. I don't define them separately, so I can't say one has helped the other, It's all the same thing. More than anything I love being on stage and performing.
Bebe Neuwirth
In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.
Samuel E. Morison