Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Bates

In an industry built to sand down edges, Alan Bates is describing a career strategy that’s almost anti-strategy: let taste and emotional disturbance do the hiring. The line reads like a quiet rebuke to the machinery of celebrity, where actors are encouraged to become brands first and artists second. Bates isn’t claiming purity so much as staking out a practical compass - “what affects me” - and implying that anything else is performance in the ugliest sense.

The phrasing matters. “Always tried” admits the pressure: even serious actors get tugged toward safer paychecks and more marketable personas. “According to what affects me” centers sensation, not status. He’s not talking about prestige scripts or “important” roles; he’s talking about being moved, rattled, implicated. That’s a subtle assertion that acting, at its best, is a moral and bodily exercise, not just technique.

Context sharpens the subtext. Bates came up in postwar British cinema and theatre, when “serious” acting (kitchen-sink realism, stage craft, literary adaptation) competed with the rising logic of global stardom. His refusal to “deliberately” chase a commercial career isn’t naïve; it’s defensive, a way to preserve range and surprise. The kicker is “a particular image”: the demand that an actor become legible, repeatable, easy to sell. Bates is arguing for the right to be inconsistent - which is another way of saying human.