Alfre Woodard Quotes

Everyone has a story.

I do like playing the darker side of life but as much as the lighter side as well. They all resonate out of the same place, which is that everyone has a story to tell. Depending on their upbringing and their history, it determines who they are as an adult. My job is to take the role from there.

I do characters. I believe in that. I think people are interesting. Now, everybody that you meet in New York City thinks that their life is a movie.

I think acting for sure takes a lot of dedication, especially when you're starting out, because it's so much rejection and it's so important to really study and know your craft.

As a writer you see the big picture and how you can tell as one character, how your storyline is going to meet up with all these other storylines. And as an actor you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

Acting makes you look at life and try to understand it in a beautiful way.

I feel my job as an actor is to explore all sides of humanity.

I don't know if it's that the scripts are evolving or just that I'm getting older, but the characters become more interesting as you get older because you've lived more life at different stages. You've loved; you've lost; you have more of that journey.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, 'Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.'

I like character-driven stuff. It doesn't matter, the size of the part.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

I'm always willing to endure humiliation on behalf of my characters.

In the best works of fiction, there's no mustache-twirling villain. I try to write shows where even the bad guy's got his reasons.

Someone once told me that the most dynamic actors are people who have stories. People who have lived life. People with experiences.

There are some times when I think acting can be a noble profession. And when those rare roles come along, like 'Down to the Bone,' you have the opportunity to be of service.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.