Ron Perlman Quotes

I don't feel the pressure to deliver an unrealistically great man to the screen; I just want to be honest to who my character is on the page. If I can reflect that and put some heart into him and make him real, then I think I've done my job, and I think that people will like who he is.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

Don't try to write what other people are writing - write what is true to you.

My job is to focus on bringing characters to life in an honest and personal way.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.

I would love nothing more to participate in a real struggle to find a character, and really delve into and develop a character. That's why I'm an actor.

Unless you're playing a real character based on a real person, if someone else has done it before, you're probably better off not watching it as an actor. Otherwise you end up trying to copy someone else.

I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare's work - that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it's very real because it's so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius.

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

I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

I'm just flowing through, when I see things, I talk about 'em. And it's cool. I don't want any title. I just say what I say, and hopefully somebody gets it. I'm not perfect, and I'm just here and trying to make a dollar, and being real at the same time.

It's one thing to be sitting at a drawing board, alone in your home and coming up with a fantasy character, and drawing her whichever way you feel like drawing, then dealing with a real performer. All of a sudden, things change. It's amazing, in working with actors, how much I learn from them and how many new lines will come to mind because of their personality or their strengths.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is exactly that. Friendship and love and passion for movies and cartoons and comic books, whatever it is that you love. Most of the way we live our lives involves looking for pleasure and beauty and happiness and affection. Real artists don't use reflexive clichés about things. It's about honoring the reality of people's lives, which defies conventions and clichés and expectations. People are interesting, period.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

I think talent, especially in acting, is being wholly yourself within the context of yourself.

I wish that we lived in a time and a generation where people would stop viewing my honesty as overly emotional. People always act like I spend my life crying in a dark room. I don't, I'm good. I'm a man. I want to be remembered as an artist that gave you a piece of me, as opposed to some surface bullshit. I don't think people realize that we die, we leave here, and either they forget about you or remember you. And how they remember you is up to you. I just want to be remembered as a poet that was open and honest because I wake up every morning and I'm me.

From an early age, I never let anyone silence my voice. This steadfast attitude has helped me as an actor and has truly enabled me to explore and evolve the characters I portray on television and film.

Don't worry if people think you're good. Make this your experience. And find out what makes you unique as an artist. You don't get the opportunity to do that as much in the real world.

You know how you're always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it's real difficult in life