Jonathan Miller Quotes

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I've always really liked theater. It fascinated me. You can create a reality and get people involved in that reality. It takes place in real time.

As a doctor, I've learned the importance and value of listening.

I always envisioned working in film and in theater. Theater and film are not, they're not in any way substitutable. What I love about theater is so different from what I love about film, and I enjoy the craft of both.

When I was little, I was a voracious reader, and that really led me to acting as well. I loved being transported into someone else's life, and that's what reading provided me. I also really love to entertain people.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

I'm not a reality TV star. I pride myself on witnessing, watching people, studying people, and being able to recreate that and create a human being.

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.

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.

Actors are observers of human life, of human behavior.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

I'm not a pyrotechnical director; I'm not good with all those innovative things. What I am interested in is how actors can touch the heads and hearts of an audience.

What I am used to is 'Gali Guleiyan,' and people talking about my performances, what new I have tried in terms of my craft or the skill of storytelling.

I never made a clear-cut in my mind between theatre and film, as I always felt that at the heart of both of them is storytelling and acting.

The biggest impact that acting and theater had was, of course, stage presence, but it also had a big impact on my writing.

As an actress, my ultimate goal is to create a universal experience in my acting.

I am not interested in entertaining people. I think being an actor provides an opportunity to give people an experience they can connect to, reflect on, learn from, laugh at.

When I play games, I'll make up little stories for just anything. It's almost the game of making up background stories for people you see on the street. You know what I mean? I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school growing up, so I found myself really observing people, and watching how they interact, and how they react to things.

One of the reasons I love acting is because I'm so interested in other people's lives, and I often incorporate things I hear or observe into my work. I've become a bit of a 'person addict,' and so I like brushing up against lots of different characters.

You know, my point in being an actor is to get people to believe that this is not about me, but something else.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

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

I've always been interested in character-driven pieces, and my approach to directing is through acting.