Lake Bell Quotes

I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

I realized early on that if I became an actor, I could play a writer and a sculptor and a painter and be all the things you just don't have time to be in your lifetime. I could get to learn about all of them.

When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the same in the end.

One of my biggest heroes in music has been David Bowie. He's said, 'I'm going to be a painter now, or I'm going to do some films,' and his audience is very forgiving, because they understand him as an artist. Whether you agree or like the result, you respect that he's expressing his artistic feelings.

More and more, I play myself, as I get older. Even as a writer, I never got typecast. I've always bounced from project to project, or initiated my own things. I was never known as the guy who wrote romantic comedies or sci-fi, or whatever, but that's fun to me. The first two films I ever had made, as a writer, were both thrillers, which was great. There was nothing funny about either of them, or not intentionally. I actually love that.

I am here on Earth to express myself, and the many media of art are my magic carpets that allow me the freedom to do so.

Being an actor gives you a chance to play all kinds of roles, very moving and dramatic on one project, silly and girlish on another. That's the most interesting thing out this business, you get to keep reinventing yourself.

I would like to use stories as a springboard for children to make their own creative responses. I would like to encourage them to express themselves using music, art, film or whatever, and upload it to a website having been inspired by particular stories.

When you're an artist, all you're trying to do is self-express.

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.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger.

I get to experiment with a lot of looks with my character so that's really fun for me. It's like getting to paint a new canvas everyday.

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth.

My influences change all the time; they have to remain current, because they're the things that capture your imagination and make you want to go into the studio.

And as much as I love the gritty characters, I like to play all sorts of characters. I'm an actor. I love to create.

When I was I kid, there were so many different things that I wanted to be. As an actor, I get a chance to be all of those things, at least for a couple of days, which is fun.

Even though the museums guarding their precious property fence everything off, in my own studio, I made them so you and I could walk in and around, and among these sculptures.

I think that what appeals to me in my work is having the opportunity to inhabit different genres and so to reach different audiences.

When you're little, you're open to things. It's not like you get into this rehearsed zone when you're a child. At first you play different sides of yourself. And I think it will be really exciting one day to have a character to go into that's not anything like me whatsoever.

The whole point of film for me is that it's such a joy. It's such a wonder. The possibilities are literally endless in terms of what you can creatively do.

I think it's fun to play with worlds that you can add a lot of your own imagination to. With 'True Blood,' you're not limited by anything, there are just leaps and bounds of the imagination you can take with these characters.

It's fun when you create a world to inhabit it and see the other characters from grounds eye view.

I'm trained in the theater, and acting, for me, is about the imaginative life I create for myself, not about basing it on something real. I think that whatever I create becomes the reality for the audience.