Ralph Richardson

The most precious things in speech are pauses.

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

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.

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