Gregory Hines Quotes

I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written.

People used to think we just faked all that stuff... it was all written, rehearsed. The fact that it looks as cobbled together as it does is just that we weren't very good.

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.

I don't have a real plan when I do an interview. I have some themes that I want to hit. But I don't have a set list of questions that I knock off.

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.

I like to just talk and whatever comes out, comes out.

I'm not asking actors to act. I'm asking them to behave. I want to see their being, not how they can fake it.

A talk show is difficult because the formula is always the same: there's a host and there's guests. Really what you can change is only so much. So, I don't have any pre-interviews, which forces real conversation.

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.

What appealed to me was the intimacy of the medium, the fact that I was doing it from my home, and the fact that I wanted to talk. I was not there to plug things. I don't do a hell of a lot of research. I go on a sort of kindred-spirit bonding that preexists the interview, and just see what unfolds.

Yeah, we have a lot of cringey moments, but that's what makes it authentic. I think for it not to be cringey, me and Kate would have to go into the edit suite, but then it would look over produced. We see it at the same time as everyone else.

I think whatever comes natural is probably the truth, and the truth is the strongest form of anything - whether serious or funny.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.

The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.

The reality of truth is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thought, in the fullness of love.

What people don't understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that's what everyone gets wrong. You can't consciously create something that's important, it's a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything.

Not that my life has been so crazy and exciting but, it just seems like if I can bring more of myself to the role. It's going to help keep it spontaneous and exciting, instead of thinking in terms of this box of a human that I have to slip myself into every week, which I tend to do more when I'm shooting a movie. On a television show, this is all kind of still new to me, doing many episodes of something, so I want to try to keep it as fresh and close to home as possible, so it doesn't get stale and I still like it every day.

We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.

To express yourself as you are, without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, is the most important thing.

I wish more people would take the extraordinary talent they have and just let their id go because that's what we discovered. We discovered that the sillier we got, the more people believed that we were speaking from our hearts.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

That's all life is - something childish and very natural. Isn't it?

I never know what I'm going to say as I walk up to the microphone. I try to be in the moment. I try to go deeper into myself. I discover things on stage that I don't discover off stage about me.