River Phoenix Quotes

I just try to put myself in the sense of being a character, sometimes male. I suppose I just like the idea of trying to be different people coming from all kinds of different angles. Most of it was just from my imagination.

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.

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.

The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

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

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

I enjoy my job as long as I can create a character, otherwise it's boring.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

I feel like when I'm on stage, when I'm writing songs, singing songs, I'm in the studio, I'm shooting videos, I kind of get to become this character, and I can make that whatever I want to make that.

Creating a character on or off the stage is an escape.

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.

I know what I love about acting - and it's the creative process.

I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.

Acting gives you freedom to express your thoughts.

I really wanted to create some of my own characters, then it became wanting to act the parts, then it sort of grew from there because I really enjoyed doing it.

For as long as I can remember, I was always creating random characters.

I'm completely in control of creating my photographs, and I'm not always in complete control of creating a character. It's more of a way to express myself than acting is, by far.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

I think everybody should act! I would encourage everybody to do one thing, join a theater class or something. It's so good to take a character that you think is wildly different from who you are, and to try to relate to that person and become that person is very helpful. It's hard to articulate what you learn, but you can feel the effect of these characters that you play and take with you.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

I can work inside the boundaries of Erika Murphy, or whoever the character is. It's fun to create somebody that's not you, that doesn't exist.

I love the process of creating a character; someone entirely different from myself, and depicting it, either on stage or screen.

I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.

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