Bill Hader Quotes

What I really like doing is storytelling, finding the body language that is necessary for the story. And when I'm doing it and it's working, I'm thrilled.

I became the storyteller of South Side Chicago. I used an old Kiwi liquid shoe polish as a microphone. I'd go around the house interviewing everybody, telling stupid jokes, doing voices. I mimicked Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., people on 'Laugh-In,' Flip Wilson.

I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

For me personally, I'm mostly focused on writing and acting right now.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.

I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.

Definitely in voice-over, you have to be completely uninhibited. More than that, you have to put yourself back into the enjoyment of pretending.

My dad knows how to tell a story. He'd make me laugh by doing all the different voices.

I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.

If you tell stories you love, you will never tell them with indifference - take it to the bank.

Actors don't need a lot of talk beyond the first few sentences. They may say they don't draw on their own life, but all actors do.

I know little stories that happen to people around me, and I can repeat that in a way that has some color.

The game is just one long conversation, and I'm anticipating that, and I will say things like 'Did you know that?' or 'You're probably wondering why.' I'm really just conversing rather than just doing play-by-play. I never thought of myself as having a style. I don't use key words. And the best thing I do? I shut up.

The most important part of acting is listening. So always act like you’re listening.

I liken every character that I do to a relationship that you're in.

The connective tissue between storytelling, advice, and comedy is passion.

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

There's something about getting onstage in a play where the actor tells the story, beginning, middle, and end, the way they want to tell it. For me, it's the most powerful place to be, and it's the most empowering place to be.

The idea of having a narrative guiding the viewer through and grasping their attention is a really compelling thing.

It takes two guys to tell a story, paint a picture, so our audience can be entertained and brought into the match. You need to suck people in emotionally to a match, and it takes both parties to paint that picture.

You see, when I go on stage I perform with just a guitar and you have to have very strong material to hold an audience from getting bored or restless. One strong way of doing that is the story because everybody will listen to a story.

I love entertaining and I love storytelling.