Mike Colter Quotes

I love the element of surprise, throwing people off of what they think they know about what I can do and who I am. I just want to keep doing that.

I think if you try to tailor your act to anybody, you end up with an act that doesn't work anyway.

Predictability is the cousin of death: I don't necessarily want people to see me coming. You know?

I want to evolve each season. I never want to be one of those brands where people know what they're going to see. I always want an element of surprise. One thing I never want to do is copy what anybody else is doing. I have a signature, and it's very important to me to stay true to that.

Like anything else, acting can become boring - a chore, really - if there isn't any challenge. And I like taking challenges. Just when people think they have me figured out, I like to surprise them.

I like to try new stuff and experiment. That's why I think it's entertaining to watch my matches, because you never know what I'm going to do, and you see things that you've never seen before.

I have a lot of maneuvers in my back pocket, so to speak. And to me, the thing is to always surprise the audience so they're always seeing something new, and not just get stuck in the same rut.

It's hard to know what's going to happen when you're filming a reality show, but if you just let life unfold, that's when the best stories evolve.

Always zig when people expect you to zag. Confound them!

[On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.

It's really hard to find stuff that is original. You pick up scripts and in four pages you know where it's going and the same thing when you are sitting in a theatre, I just rejoice when something unfolds in a way that I'm not conducive.

A good film to me is like lightning in a bottle. I used to think that meant hit and run. But then I've changed my definition about what lightning in a bottle means. I think it means that you wait for that surprising moment that you really didn't expect would happen, as good as it may have gone in rehearsal.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.

The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power.

I want people to come to the game to see what I will do next.

Be yourself. An original is always worth more than a copy.

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do.

If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.

I didn't want to feel like I was mimicking or copying someone else's performance, whether it's subconscious or not.

Whatever coast he's on, a man should be himself. I don't write in any particular idiom, I write Charles Mingus.

I love the idea of people being themselves in films.

The beauty of the band was you never knew what was going to come out next.

What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.