Meryl Streep Quotes

All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

We have to be able to use our imaginations to make the character's experiences real to us.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

I'm not saying that I am all of my characters, but for me to bring a character to life, you've got to be able to find your own truth.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

Actors actually have a feeling, like a sixth sense. They are like mediums. But it only works - you can only become this medium or this vessel to transport emotions and images and feelings - if you are not too full of yourself. Otherwise, there wouldn't be space for a story to live inside of you or a world to evolve in you and around you.

I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.

I write to be the characters that I am not.

When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.

Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

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.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.