Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Bates

An actor admitting he sometimes betrays his own instincts is a quiet flex of honesty. Alan Bates isn’t selling the myth of the always-right gut; he’s acknowledging the professional reality that choices get negotiated: directors push, careers wobble, rent is due, the “smart” move beckons. That opening clause - “Occasionally I do things against my inner voice” - reads like a confession and a warning label. It primes you to trust what follows because it refuses purity.

Then he pivots into advice that sounds simple but is actually anti-industrial: chase “the thing that touches you most,” even when you can’t justify it. In acting terms, that’s a rebuke to overthinking and to the kind of prestige logic that rewards legible motivation and tidy narratives. Bates is defending the irrational spark: the role that unsettles you, the script that feels risky, the moment that lands in your body before it lands in your brain. The phrase “even if you don’t quite know why” is the key subtext; it elevates mystery from a problem to solve into a compass.

Context matters: Bates came up in a postwar British acting culture that prized technique but also authenticity - the charge of lived feeling beneath craft. His line argues that art (and maybe life) isn’t made by the most defensible choice, but by the most magnetizing one. It’s not romanticism; it’s a practical method for staying alive in work that can easily turn into a series of strategic yeses.