Jim McKay Quotes

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

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

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

If you have a great script and great dialogue, you don't need to improvise.

I really wanted to create some of my own characters, then it became wanting to act the parts, then it sort of grew from there because I really enjoyed doing it.

Something that I really enjoy doing is creating and being a part of very different characters and very different projects.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

When I was a kid, I used to make up all these characters. I love comedy a lot, and I don't get to do it often. Somewhere in the middle, I shifted into doing drama.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

Writing a great script - not just a good one, but a great one - is almost an impossible task.

It's all about story and character with me, and I don't care if the job is on daytime or prime time or the web. Hey, give me a good character and someone to listen, and I'll do my acting on a street corner.

As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all.

Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.

It's fun to improvise, but I still think it's better to have a great script, you know, like a Charlie Kaufman script.

To create characters, one must build background. And one of the tools we use is improvisation.

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I'd constantly be that guy who'd get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

It's well known that actors are lousy writers.

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

I started out wanting to be an actor and I like to give actors as much as possible. I love writing stuff where they can really lose control.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a character's and let his perceptions take over.