Philip Roth Quotes

As an actor, we spend so much putting the mask on and trying to be someone you're not.

Acting is like a Halloween mask that you put on.

As an actor, there are so many different people to hide behind.

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

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.

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

I'm always in disguise in one form or another in my plays.

What once was an expression of who I was - acting - also became my hiding place.

Man is a make-believe animal: he is never so truly himself as when he is acting a part.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

I do everything in the third person. Performance is about being someone else.

I start the show, and the armour goes on, and the showman comes out. When the show is finished, that comes off, and I become soft centred again.

Well, you create your own persona, don't you? And you have to live with that. But the people that I meet, they don't think that I'm a lunatic. And if they do, then that's OK, because it means that I'm playing the parts all right.

I was in character all the time when I was little.

I felt very comfortable playing Don Draper, because I knew that Don Draper is a character - that Dick Whitman is playing Don Draper. I felt very comfortable in that manufactured-confidence mode. He himself is manufacturing it.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

If you speak in a different accent, you begin to move in a slightly different way. You think in a slightly different way. It's part of trying to find what makes a character.

At times, I come across as crude or crass, that irritates you when I come across like a Neanderthal or a babbling idiot at times. But I like to be that person. I like to show you all that person because that's who you come to see.

I was always amazed the way people would come in looking one way and transform completely to the point where I couldn't recognize their language, their accent, the way they looked, their hair, their face even changed becoming so inside of the character.

It's a bit of an outside-in approach - so often the clothing can reveal so much about a character. It's like part of her superhero costume that she gets to put on and become someone else.

Like someone once said, "If you're going to play the part, you better wear the eye patch." You need to perform the function, you know.

I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me I believe in my dance-- And my destiny

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

We do what we do, because of who we are. If we did otherwise, we would not be ourselves.