Stella Adler Quotes

You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore.

Most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.

Master technique and then forget about it and be natural.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.

This game, it seems when you play it the best, is when you're not really thinking a lot and just reacting and keeping it at its simplest point - just see it and hit it.

We never do anything well till we cease to think about the manner of doing it.

I don't think it's about playing and singing, to be honest. That seems like old news, you know? I wasn't thinking about that. I just think that's in my body now. Dancers don't think about their legs moving one way and their arms moving another. Over time, you incorporate that into your instrument.

It's not like I mean to throw no-look passes. I think it kind of happens out of instinct. As I do it, I'm like, 'Dang, I didn't even mean to do that.'

I work hard on the precision of my long shots, but you can't plan it in games. Sometimes it all just opens up for you to give it a try.

The less thinking you do, the better you play.

When I play guitar, it's automatic. I don't try to do something; I just do it. And it's already so ingrained in what I do, I don't think about it. I don't try to do something - I just do it. And the more I do it that way, the more I surprise myself. And if I surprise myself, that's the best thing.

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

The things that are more my own style are something that I don't really have to think about. The only time I have to think about them is if I want to force myself not to do it the way I do it.

To become really good at anything, you have to practice and repeat, practice and repeat, until the technique becomes intuitive.

I prepare to the point where instinct take over.

When I'm in my groove there is no thinking. Everything just happens.

When I'm playing well, I don't even take aim.

Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

You have to remember everything you've created. But then comes a moment when it's all automatic pilot, where it all comes together and you don't have to think about it any more.

I always want my mouth to be like two steps ahead of my brain and I want my hands to move without thinking. I want to be able to dive into my computer or use my controllers without having to be, like, "Hmm, what would be a good choice here?" You just want music to happen like the same way the sweat's rolling off my face.

The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.

Trust your instincts, and the best way to trust them is to practice them.

Great games are played, not made.

Sometimes you can almost play the game with a blindfold on.

If I think I will get the ball, I go out. I can't stop halfway because the goal is empty and the player would have the opportunity to shoot. You make the reaction, and then, of course, you have to be sure to get the ball. But it's years of practice. You can't say from one day to the other, 'Now I will do it,' you know? You have to feel it.