Ron Stallworth Quotes

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

I'm used to being someone else 10 months out of the year.

Doing 'White Collar,' quite often my character goes undercover, so therein lies the compounding of the imagination. I get to play Peter Burke and then someone else when Peter Burke goes undercover.

Acting is bluffing, pretending to be something.

I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.

Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.

I'm always in disguise in one form or another in my plays.

It is a career of make-believe, of masks. We all have masks in life.

It's funny - if you impersonate somebody, they have no idea it's them.

But then acting is all about faking. We're all very good at faking things that we have no competence with.

Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.

Pretending to be other people is my game and that to me is the essence of the whole business of acting.

I'm not really an impersonator.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

Standing in public in other people's clothes, pretending to be someone else. It's a strange way for a grown man to make a living.

I used to dress up and impersonate our next-door neighbor, Miss Cox. She wore rubber boots, a wool hat, and her nose always dripped.

I spend my working life pretending to be someone else.

Drug people are the very vermin of humanity.... Occasionally we must adopt their dress and tactics.

I think one of the things I enjoy about acting is the transformation, and part of that is certainly the physical transformation. If people are confused forever, wondering where they have seen me before, that feels like exactly where I want to live. It feels like something's working.

I really wanted to be a spy. I guess it's a bit like acting, where you play a role.

When I do an impression of someone or when I am pretending to be someone else, something freaky happens: I feel the person I am mimicking behind my eyeballs. Their head is sitting perfectly inside mine, helping me project a false self out on to the world. And it's not always a choice.

I never thought I could pretend to be someone else.

I was Donnie Brasco, the Mafia guy, in character. But in my head, I was a special agent. I never lost sight of who I was or why I was there.

For actors, the idea is that you convince people you're someone you're not.

I can walk into someone's house, kiss their wife, sit down at their table, and eat their dinner. I can lift a passport at an airport, and in twenty minutes it will seem like it's mine. I can be a blackbird staring in the window. I can be a cat creeping along a ledge. I can go anywhere I want and do the worst things I can imagine, with nothing to ever connect me to those crimes. Today I look like me, but tomorrow I could look like you. I could be you.