India de Beaufort Quotes

I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I've always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.

Everyone learns how to talk by doing an impression of their parents. I'm one of many people who has a highly developed ability to do that.

Only lately, like within the last few years, have I had people actually do an impression of me to me, which weirds me out to think of what they have picked up on, without ever realizing it myself.

People have asked me why are Australians and Brits so good at American accents, and it's quite simple. We grew up listening to the American sound on our TV. That's why American actors have a hard time with foreign accents.

To be honest, accents are one of those things for me, personally, that usually come quite naturally by just listening to the people.

If you're in America a lot, it's easy to get into playing American. All of it, the sounds, the energies, all very different. But it's really hard to do the accent. I tend to try and stay in it all day, which is the only way I can manage it.

I'm a parrot. I can pick up an accent and just do it.

I'm not a bad mimic, and I can pick up speech cadences that I would not pick up if I didn't hit the road.

I would write down the lyrics to 'C.R.E.A.M.' in Korean - not translating it, but phonetically writing out each word. I didn't know what they were saying, so I would just write everything down as I heard it. I would recite it and imitate it like that. That's how I started to write my own raps.

I seem to have a bit of a knack for accents; I can pick them up quick enough.

I think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.

I say with pride that I've done over a hundred voices or something, and some of them may have only had two or three lines, but I literally never ran out. I think I'm a bit of a savant that way. I kind of remember every voice I hear, famous or otherwise, and can imitate it pretty fast. I've enjoyed mimicking people famous and not famous all through my life, and they kind of remain in the memory banks, so I'm ready to trot them out.

Sometimes I think that kids who are given junk food then don't crave it as adults in the same way. I don't know. I'm trying to figure out what the psychology is behind it before I have children.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

I took opera lessons. I can't read music to save my life, but I would just copy and get away with it. I think that they thought I could read music, but I can't. I would just listen. It was really me just mimicking. That's one of the reasons I decided I didn't want to do that anymore.

I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.

Well, when I was a kid I used to hide behind the curtains at home at Christmas and I used to try and be Elvis. There was a certain ambience between the curtains and the French windows, there was a certain sound there for a ten year old. That was all the ambience I got at ten years old... I think! And I always wanted to be a certain, a bit similar to that. But I didn't want to sell pizza.

When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

Did they practice looking suspicious in mirrors? Welcome to the United States. Don’t even think about chewing gum the wrong way.’ (Carlos)

I think I probably am doing animation because I started as a kid and I learned on my own, and I worked by myself a lot. It's the only thing I really prepared myself to do in any kind of depth. And I've just kind of imbibed the technology and techniques and the thinking about telling stories this way. It just feels natural to me.

If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ‘em. Take those hands.

I was never really an impressionist. If there was somebody within my range, maybe I could work on it and do a little exaggeration of them - which I think is really the way to do an impression.

I don't know what I could say specifically, except that everything I've learned as a kid of course must somehow play into what I do now. I think when everything kind of drifted away, I had to go out into the world and learn how to emotionally be okay with all that, which to me was a decades-long process. But also I happened to find my way in life, to find a living, to figure out what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think all of that now probably helps me. It probably gives me more life experience to draw from.

You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.