"Free Write."

          Because this book is so chock-full of quotes that I absolutely love, I've decided to dedicate this week to my favorite Meisner quotes (that I haven't already used as "Quotes of the Week"). Here are the best in my opinion:

Meisner: "Are you looking at me now?"

Student: "Yes."

M: "As Othello?"

S: "No."

M: "As who?"

S: "As myself, I guess."

M: "That's right. Can you hold on to that?"

"Silence has a myriad of meanings. In the theater silence is an absence of words, but never an absence of meaning."

"You try to be logical, as in life. You try to be polite, as in life. May I say, as the world's oldest living teacher, 'F*** polite!'"

"I tell you this: you cannot be a gentleman and be an actor."

"To become an accomplished musician you have to realize that it takes twenty years to be a master at it! A master! And the same is true of acting."

"In other words, if you don't give up acting out your cliches, I can't help you to learn how to act. I'm trying to get you to do an exercise, not to play a part."

"Don't behave as if acting were something that any amateur can turn on! It's not true!"

"Some years ago I owned a car. In winter when I got into my car, what's the first thing I did when I started the car? I pulled out the choke to give the cold motor some extra gas. It's a warming-up process, right? Well, for an actor, preparation is a warming-up process."

"Restraint is a virtue, but reticence in an actor isn't."

"Now I'm saying we have moved beyond the fundamental. Now it's possible to respond reasonably. So if your partner asks you what time it is, for God's sake look at your watch and tell him! And if he has the temerity to ask you how old you are, you have my permission to lie to him through your teeth!"

"Acting is a scary, paradoxical business. One of its center paradoxes is that in order to succeed as an actor you have to lose consciousness of your own self in order to transform yourself into the character in the play. It's not easy, but it can be done."

"If my partner in a scene said to me, 'How do you feel today?' I'd say quietly, 'Lousy.' That's perfectly acceptable. I don't have to take a pistol out and shoot myself or writhe on the floor."

"You cannot hide emotion, but you don't need three tons of it in order to color your behavior properly. It's just that you must not be empty."

"Don't be an actor. Be a human being who works off what exists under imaginary circumstances. Don't give a performance. Let the performance give you."

"I'm going to tell you all something. The text is your greatest enemy."

"There are some parts we don't have the temperament for even if we understand them, and there are some parts we are so right for that we don't even know that we understand them."

"Shaw said, 'Self-betrayal, magnified to suit the optics of the theater, is the whole art of acting.'"

"The American actor is very lucky. Why? Because so little is asked of him."

          I'm not even finished with the book yet, and it is easy to see that Meisner definitely has plenty of interesting things to say. I look forward to finishing the book and getting an overall view of his technique.