Sarah Paulson Quotes

I remember watching Meryl Streep in, The River Wild. There's this scene where she's has a gun pointed at her, it's absurd in a lot of ways. Someone pulls a gun on her I think, I'm not really fully aware of the scene and she just, she starts, you see her terrified. And then all of a sudden she starts to burst out laughing. She starts laughing. Like she can't stop laughing. Because she's terrified and she's emotional and there are no rules to what you're supposed to feel. That to me is like A number one, that's the thing I have to remind myself all the time.

Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.

I've always believed acting is an improvisational art form, even when not a single line is changed. I mean, the behavior should always be improvised. My favorite moments in any performance are when I'm just along for the ride; when I'm surprising myself. I know when I'm done and I think to myself, 'Gee, I didn't see that coming,' I've done well.

When I do a take, I very often try things that I haven't planned to try to see if I can pull it off.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

Most of the time I'm thinking, I'm glad that scene was improvised.

There's that great thing about acting - you're wearing your heart on your sleeve, and you're speaking off the cuff. You know, you're fearless about it, and - and it's great. And I love it.

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

A lot of the stuff you do as an actor - or I do, because I can't speak for everyone - is not always consciously thought out. A lot of the time, for me, it's actually just feeling stuff, and it happens all in the moment and your body reacts.

I'm more interested in knowing my cues than my lines. If you know what your cues are, then you know what your reaction is going to be to them. Acting is about reacting, and if I can kind of purely react, that's easier for me.

When I was younger, I thought I had to shut myself off, work really hard to cry. I learned after a while that that's just not... You know, often in life, you cry when you're caught off-guard. That's where I need to be when I'm acting, too.

It was amazing that during rehearsals, without any of the costume on, the character was there complete. It just happened. Half the time, I didn't know I was doing it.

Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

The key to acting is less acting and just reacting.

You don't go to a comedy and try to laugh. You laugh in spite of yourself. You don't just come on stage and cry. Something has pushed you to cry.

The best actors just stay in the moment, and whatever happens in the scene is a genuine surprise. You really do not know what's going to happen next. But living that out in life is very dangerous because it throws you into a place where you don't know if you're going to survive.

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and 'inevitability.' How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

I'm always an advocate of 'acting is reacting,' which can be difficult.

People shouldn't be embarrassed just because they get caught acting a little silly.

As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is.

An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

I actually quite like working with kids and I like working with animals, which everybody says you shouldn't do. It makes you feel like you're not acting, as soon as you have someone who's providing stuff to react to.

Whatever you see me do is spontaneous reactions on stage. It's nothing planned. It's nothing that I got in the room and tried to think of hard. It just happens through feeling.

Laughing and crying are really similar - what happens to your body. It's a very similar process in your diaphragm. Like a musician, you have to do your scales once in a while and warm up your voice.

Tears are curious things, for like earthquakes or puppet shows, they can occur at any time, without any warning and without any good reason.