Forest Whitaker Quotes

The fact that I like to make characters doesn't mean that I like to watch my characters being made, my performance.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

Acting is way of making yourself exist.

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 doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.

I like to disappear in the parts I play.

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.

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

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

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

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

I still love finding the soul of the characters I play and defining who they are. This to me is my paint set, and the colors are always exciting to choose.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

As an actor, if you were to simplify what acting really is, it's about letting go.

With modelling, you provide an image that is fake; with acting you have to provide an image that's real.

Acting has always been a way for me to express myself, and show all my vulnerabilities and flaws through my characters.

I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

Acting is an art form. If you are not creating something that's unusual and informative and at least has the possibility of being illuminating, then you are not into it as an art form.

When I started acting, it was really the way for me to be able to communicate.

What I find most interesting about acting is transforming myself.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

I would like any type of character that I could be creative with and totally delve into.