Phyllis Smith Quotes

I use myself for each part. Naturally, it's my body, it's my soul, it's my feelings. That's the only way I know how to work. I couldn't pretend.

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.

I feel what I feel. If I wanna cry, I'm gonna cry - regardless of who watches me.

Emotional sounds don't lie.

An actress must be a woman whose emotional perceptions are true, and to make them so, she must have a fine contempt for any art or thought that betrays them for something false.

When I'm writing, I'm trying to immerse myself in the chaos of an emotional experience, rather than separate myself from it and look back at it from a distance with clarity and tell it as a story. Because that's how life is lived, you know?

A lot of times when I'm writing lyrics, I just think about insecurities that I might have and turn them into a scene. Some things may be true, and some things may not.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

I try not to intellectualise what I do.

For me, acting comes straight from the heart. In that sense I don't act at all. I think that to feel the character's pain I have to be myself. Somewhere audiences see that.

I think your program has to reflect what your basic feelings are. I'll plead guilty to that.

I don't project no image. I just act like myself. I write about how I feel, the emotional stage I'm in at the time. So I write from the heart. I never write from my mind. My brain, I mean.

Playing is just about feeling. Playing isn't necessarily about misery. Playing isn't necessarily about happiness. But it's just about letting yourself feel all those things that you have already on the inside of you, but you're all the time trying to push them aside because they don't make for polite conversation or something.

A lot of the work I've done has been about being very raw and open with your emotions.

I never try and tune anything out. I think that's a mistake. You want to bring all the honest stuff that's going on inside you into your work. Otherwise, you're keeping a lot of authenticity out.

Acting is revealing the truth that is already within you and that reflects the character that you're doing.

Feelings don't lie.

I generally won't do a role unless I feel like it's in my system somewhere, even if it's just a molecule of it. Like I just felt like I knew it and if I talked about it or discussed it or tried to rehearse it that it would take away the energy from that scene so I went in there and just did it.

Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

My act has always reflected what's going on in my life.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

What we try to do in TSAW, which is Tasha Smith Actors Workshop, is to help the actor get to the core of who they really are and how they really feel. So, we may have them do a dump, where you just basically express everything that you feel that you have not been able to express, whether it's good, bad, or ugly.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

At some point, a flash of sustained clarity reveals the difference between what someone would have you believe is true, and what you know from the depths of your own heart to the peaks of your soul to be true. What happens after that is up to you.

Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.