Christian Bale Quotes

Actors incorporate certain emotions from our own lives in order to create characters, and emotions come from experience.

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.

When you're portraying someone that really existed, there has to be a time as an actress where you leave reality and move into the fantasy world so you can do your job of creating a character.

It's hard to actually take details from your personal life and apply them a scene because, as much as you can identify with a feeling, you just get muddled. As soon as you start bringing your own stuff in, it's like, 'No, that's not right.' You're playing a different person. You can relate, but you have to leave that stuff at the door.

I think that's so strange, because they do know that we're all actors and we perform things that have not necessarily anything to do with us personally.

You have to believe that you are the character or the thing or whatever the hell you're playing.

You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.

And as much as I love the gritty characters, I like to play all sorts of characters. I'm an actor. I love to create.

Privacy is important to me. But it's not just about sticking two fingers up and saying I don't want anyone to know my business. It's an artistic choice. I think that for any actor to convince their audience that they have completely inhabited a character requires a certain level of anonymity.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

When I play a gay character, I want to be as believable as possible. And when I'm playing a straight character, I also want to be as believable as possible. So the less that people know about my personal life, the more believable I can be as a character.

I'm an actor, and I love the art of creating a character.

I love the creating part of taking on a character. It is fun to be another person and create what it would be like to be that person.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

If you can walk into a set and feel the reality of it, then immediately you're not having to work to bring yourself into the character.

I play a character every day of my life, and I don't want to play a character as myself. They can judge me as an actress, not as a person. I'm not a spokeswoman for Anna.

You've got to be honest with yourself aesthetically about who could you play. You want to artistically be true to that character.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don't meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it's essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you're going to be an actor.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

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