Time & Perspective Quote by Simone Signoret

Acting begins as a kind of sanctioned lying, and Simone Signoret is wryly admitting the weirdness before anyone can romanticize it. The line lands because it’s domestic: not a director’s note or a critic’s verdict, but “his family’s questions” after day one. That’s where careers get tested first, in the kitchen and the car ride home, when people want a simple report: What did you do today? Were you good? Are you sure this is real work?

Signoret’s “truthfully” is doing the heavy lifting. A first day on set is famously untranslatable: long stretches of waiting, sudden bursts of high-stakes performance, technical jargon, repeated takes that make the “real” version of an emotion impossible to locate. Even if you wanted to be accurate, the job resists the ordinary narrative of labor. The actor can’t say, “I cried for three minutes,” because the crying was fragmented into angles and lighting resets; can’t say, “I became someone else,” because that sounds either pretentious or alarming. So the closest honest answer is inevitably misleading.

There’s also a small, sharp defense embedded here. By universalizing it - “isn’t an actor alive” - Signoret frames the gap between acting and everyday speech as structural, not personal failure. The family wants sincerity; the profession manufactures sincerity. That mismatch is the origin story of an actor’s double life: intimate emotions rendered as product, then carried home like a prop you can’t quite put down.