Jane Asher Quotes

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

A large part of acting is just pretending. You get to work with these other great make-believers, all making believe as hard as they can.

We actors do this to pretend, to go into imaginary circumstances, so when the imaginary circumstance is of a different time, that just compounds the joy of doing what we do.

I always loved dressing up and telling stories.

One of my favourite games as a child was to dress up and improvise. Acting seemed obvious.

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

To me, getting to do music and videos, you work on a character. Being onstage is acting; you get to be larger than life and larger than yourself.

It's like kids playing house: 'You play the father, I'll play the mother.' You know, you dress up, you play, they pay, you go home. It's a game - acting's a game.

As actors, we get to hide. You can change your hair and your accent, and it's not you. You have tricks, these masks.

We're actors. We're the opposite of people.

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

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.

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

I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.

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.

When you're acting, you're escaping and hiding behind something. It's cliched to say, but there's a safety there.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

The boundary between real life and acting is hard to find.

What drew me to acting in the first place was disguise.

As a child, I was always drawn to heroic characters. I decided I wanted to act when I realised that Superman and all those gangsters and Indians were just real people in costume.

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

I like projects in which I can really act and not be me all the time.

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.

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.