Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

You have to be willing to expose yourself, at least to yourself, to get to some kind of truth about a character.

Once you know the world you know how your character fits into it.

The philosophical underpinnings of my approach to acting are that there are universal human qualities, and that every character is actually available within each one of us, that if we tap down into that universal humanness, we can find whatever character it is that we need to play already there within ourselves, and it's just a matter of peeling apart the onion that is you and finding that character within you, because of this universal human quality.

Be yourself and true to yourself. You can do different things in the world.

Often the deep valleys of our PRESENT will be UNDERSTOOD only by LOOKING BACK on them from the mountains of our FUTURE experience. Often we can’t see the LORD’S HAND in our lives until long after the trials have passed. Often the most difficult times of our lives are ESSENTIAL building blocks that form the FOUNDATION of our CHARACTER and pave the way to FUTURE opportunity, understanding, and happiness.

Every work coming from the creator is about getting the demons out, and each character in those stories had a different personal crisis to get through.

Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am.

I was very, very shy when I was little. Acting lets you access all those different parts of yourself to make the character authentic.

I stay true, because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character.

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.

Talent develops in quiet, alone; character is sharpened in the torrent of the world.

The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories

In acting, you get to explore such an artistic side with different characters to research and learn and explore different things inside yourself and I do that anyway, so I might as well be doing something that I already do, as in a second nature to me, on film.

There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feed it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You will find in this way the path of your life.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Each movie was a challenge for me, as a man, as an actor. After each movie, something changed in my life, in my character.

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

With every movie I do and every day I go to work, my goal is not just to reach for difference, but also figure out how to look at world and characters in a different way.

It is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

I love the process of creating a character; someone entirely different from myself, and depicting it, either on stage or screen.

Character is both developed and revealed by tests, and all of life is a test.

The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.

When you come out of the other end of a long process, working with a character [you realize] this character has really shaped my ideas.

Be your authentic self. Your authentic self is who you are when you have no fear of judgment, or before the world starts pushing you around and telling you who you're supposed to be. Your fictional self is who you are when you have a social mask on to please everyone else. Give yourself permission to be your authentic self.