Octavia Spencer Quotes

I'd be more likely to go for somebody who is like me. Well, I like creative people, so whatever that means... Yeah, authentic and creative.

I think my strength is to act instinctively, really quickly, on what I believe, what I see in this person. A proper portrait. I wouldn't dream of doing something inappropriate for that person. I guess I make the person comfortable around me.

I realized that I could try to sound like Waylon Jennings, or I could try to be like Waylon Jennings... but it's impossible to do both.

When humor works, it works because it's clarifying what people already feel. It has to come from someplace real.

I don't like to go trampling on other people's sounds. That's really about it - I don't gravitate towards it, I try to move away from it.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.

The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting.

You have to believe that people don't want what you think they're going to like, you know? They want what you like. Once you start doing that, you actually start connecting with people.

If there is one thing that makes me unique, it's that I riff a lot.

I meet a person as the person. I try to not give away who they are or who they're supposed to be.

As wild and raunchy as Richard Pryor was, people related to his honesty because they found something in their life that they understood.

I've been saying it at all our Senate Democratic retreats we need to speak to the heart, not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody's fears and resentments, but truly to speak to the heart so that people know that we're actually on their side.

If you try to sound like somebody else, it will never work because we already have that person. You are noticed when you try to be an original sound.

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

As nature made every man with a nose and eyes of his own, she gave him a character of his own, too; and yet we, O foolish race! must try our very best to ape some one or two of our neighbors, whose ideas fit us no more than their breeches!

That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.

While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal. The first personality, which no one should copy.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Imitation has to be avoided. Understanding should be the only law, never imitation.

To understand me, you have to meet me...

It is impossible to imitate Voltaire without being Voltaire.

I didn't want to feel like I was mimicking or copying someone else's performance, whether it's subconscious or not.

In anything you do, it's important to have your own personality there.