Mary Steenburgen Quotes

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

Acting requires a great amount of empathy for real lived human experiences.

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

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

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.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

I discovered that there was no difference between playing a real-life character and a fictional one.

I think acting is a work of imagination.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

Acting - you're taking someone else's visions and someone else's inspirations, and it's up to you to portray that to everyone watching the film.

I love disappearing. That's what acting is. For me it's about putting on a persona, stepping into a pair of shoes. It's my face, but I'm using it as a tool for that spirit, that character.

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

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

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.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

I was Aladdin, and then I was Captain Von Trapp from 'Sound Of Music' when I was 7 or 8, and then King Arthur. I was always the lead. I've always enjoyed being onstage, acting obnoxious, being someone that wasn't me, hiding behind a character.