John C. Reilly Quotes

I used to think the actor's job was immersing himself completely in another personality.

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.

I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

I consider myself a character actor.

Actors are con men and con men are actors.

I don't know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

Just because you're upfront with someone doesn't mean you're an honest person; you might just be someone in the passenger seat.

You can't trust actors.

I think good acting is always character acting.

There's an art to being a good actor, there's an art to being a celebrity, and there's an art to longevity.

I don't have any theories about acting, and I don't think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn't take himself too seriously, and shouldn't try to make acting something it isn't.

People assume actors are born liars, but I'd argue the actor's job is to tell the truth. And I've realised I'm not a good liar.

My take is that acting is acting. A performance is a performance. With performance capture, if you don't get the performance on the day, you can't enhance the performance.

I guess just a lively imagination is the best effort an actor can have.

It's a challenge, writing about actors, especially a good actor, because you can't always tell when they're being honest and when they're pretending - that is, when they're acting. The really good ones don't always seem to know themselves.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

The idea of an actor is that you should be able to play anything.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

You can't follow another actor's performance. You can't be Robert DeNiro, because you're not Robert DeNiro, and, you know, he is.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

I'm a bigger fan of my directing than in acting. Acting is just harder. You know, not harder, per se, because directing is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. But it's harder to enjoy my work as an actor, you know.

We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.

For me, when I do my best acting, it's mainly imagination. Then I really have a lot of fun with it.