Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

As an actor the best thing you have is your imagination. You're not going to have all the experiences, but you draw on the things that you know. So I think you definitely use the things that you're familiar with to your advantage.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

My favorite thing about acting is being alone and going through the scripts and working on it and getting ideas and asking myself questions, looking outside myself for them and researching and getting to the bottom of something and being creative with it as an actor and how to express it in a creative fashion. That's my favorite part. And, the actual acting of it.

As actors we're always trying to use our creative imagination.

You learn from the actors that you're working with. I've taken a lot from all of them.

It's not good just to have life experience of film-making and that's all. It's hard to play a real person when you've been in jets and town cars for three years.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

A lot of actors and actresses pull from past experiences.

You can say something that can really help and actor and you can say something that can really get in the way of an actor's performance, kind of cut them off from their instincts and really get into their heads. And every actor's different. Every actor requires something different. Being an actor, for me, was the greatest training to be a writer and director.

I've been in front of the camera a million times as a musician, and even directed a few music videos. So, I know a lot about spacing, focus, blocking, etcetera. So, acting isn't totally new for me. Still, I find it fascinating, because you actually get to be another person.

I'm all for whatever it takes to get wherever you need to get with a character, as long as you don't wipe it on me.

Most actors have a process that they can go through, that they rely on, or that they've discovered, and that can evolve from project to project.

I've never been trained as an actor. I'm no Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Johnny Depp.

As an actor, the last thing you ever want to end up on is just a procedural show where you're just a talking head. There's nothing worse than just spitting out words. Words interrupt performance. Performance is king in my world, when it comes to why I'm in this business.

My dad didn't often bring me to the set, being an actor himself, so my infancy as an actor was wracked with a lot of giggles and nervousness.

I'm fascinated with actors, and I've never quite understood the process.

I don't use any techniques; I'm not trained to be an actor. I just enjoy working in films.

I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.

Nobody should expect an actor to have these wonderful ideas and concepts about the world: they pretend to be other people for a living.

It is hard sometimes to see how other actors are working when you are working with them.

You know, I've never been much of a method actor. I feel like, with every project I go in extremely prepared and I like to have a good time.

As an actor, it's amazing to get to create different characters.

I don't usually like talking about acting or what my process is, and all those kinds of things, because I don't necessarily think it's helpful to talk about how I do my job.

Actors aren't all the same. They have very different skills. There are actors of intellect who are very thoughtful about everything they do... and then there are actors of instinct who don't know what they're doing until the cameras roll... My father was actually quite thoughtful about what he did, while my mother was much more instinctual.

I studied acting for 10 years before I went for an audition. I studied with Lee Strasberg and Actors Studio teachers, and went to the High School of Performing Arts.