Billy Wilder Quotes

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

I treat any scene the same - dialogue, action - you're still creating something in character. It's all acting, fighting.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I'm more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I'm mostly an improviser, though I haven't improvised in awhile.

I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.

When I work, I think mainly in terms of dramatic choices.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

I like to warm them up with stand-up, get them into my world and tone, and then bring other characters on. There's so much you can do theatrically on stage. You keep changing the direction and angles, and then people don't get bored.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

I've been on stage plenty of times, and one of the things about being a stage actress is you have a 3-month run to revisit the story nightly and play it again.

I think being an actor makes me a better writer and vice versa. I know the kinds of roles I would kill to play, and I try to create them for others.

With acting, I didn't get much from it.

I'm an actor. I love to create.

I'm an actor, and I'm supposed to reflect real people.

I always wanted to perform. I remember being 5 years old and telling my parents to sit down as I was going to put on a play for them.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It's not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

An actor is an instrument. One needs to control them.

My style is an extension of acting and an outcome of some serious lessons I picked up learning when I did theatre in my early days.

Oh, yes - being interested in acting never changes. Acting is in your blood, and of course I'll always be interested in it.

Modeling teaches you to be completely conscious of the camera. Acting is being totally unconscious of it.

For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.