Stella Adler Quotes

I can work inside the boundaries of Erika Murphy, or whoever the character is. It's fun to create somebody that's not you, that doesn't exist.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor.

Definitely in voice-over, you have to be completely uninhibited. More than that, you have to put yourself back into the enjoyment of pretending.

You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination.

I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

As an actor, you always want to reach back to being a child and having the spontaneity and the imagination of a child.

What's great about acting is you can let all your wackiness hang out while you work.

Obviously, as an actor, you have to embrace your imagination all the time, but when you're doing one of these films, you have to embrace your most childlike imagination - a sense of wonder and uninhibited playfulness.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that.

I've always toyed around with creating over-the-top lady characters in my head.

The most fundamental important thing for me as an actor is maintaining a sense of play. It's so important.

Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.

You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

Every person has contributed to me as a human, but a lot of the characters I do are ones I created.

A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.

As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing you need when inventing characters is empathy.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.

As you become acquainted with a character you are creating, you add parts of yourself that are pertinent to that character.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.

I'm only 13, so I can't say "life experiences." So, basically, I had to... act! I had to make up character that is very old. I guess that's why they call it acting - you do draw from some stuff in your life, I guess, but it's not real life. You have to fake it.