Kathe Koja Quotes

Acting is not about anything romantic, not even fantasy, although you do create fantasy.

You've always got to have an imagination in the game we're in but it explodes on this. You get to try the costumes on before you start and feel the weight of them, which is great. But then you're opposite some of the greatest actors in the world and away you go. You find your imagination takes over without you really even thinking about it.

As an actor, you deal in fantasy, imagination, and concentration. Those are your three weapons. Those are your bullets.

I am an actor and I live in the world of pretend in my working capacity. I live in the world of my imagination.

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 theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

On some level, acting is the art of pretend, and you have to have a highly cultivated sense of imagination. You have to be able to see things that aren't there, no matter what aspect of acting, whether it's green screen, whether it's on stage, whether it's anything else, whether you're working on the radio.

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.

I knew there was something special about the theater for me something beyond the regular reality, something that I could get into and transcend and become something other than myself.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

We didn't have a backyard, so as I child, I would turn the coffee table into a stage and put on shows. But it was just a fun thing to do; I never thought about it as a profession. That started as a fluke; my mother had a friend who was an artist with a theater company, and I started going there after school because my mom knew I'd be safe.

Honestly, I think I was in kindergarten. I remember seeing a play and realizing that was what I wanted to do. I remember always wanting to retreat to my room or somewhere private to play pretend by myself.

When you're even on a regular movie set, you still have to suspend your disbelief. You're working there with only 3 walls of a room, and you're in costume, and you have a camera 6 inches from you and have a crew of 75 watching you. So even there, you have to crank up your imagination.

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.

I go to the theater and dream. You learn your lines, and that gives you the security to allow the imagination and heart to come out.

Magic has universal appeal. I don't believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books, but I'd love it to be real.

Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me.

In a funny way, acting, to me, is all make-believe, even if the film has unicorns in it or is a normal movie that can be set in real-life time. I'm still imagining that I'm a different character, so it's all, in a funny way, like fantasy.

Performers love to perform - that's the thing that we do. I think one of the best things was being able to imagine anything that I wanted, anything that I came up with we could do, because this theater is unbelievable.

I like being able to play make believe as my job. I think I played make-believe growing up a little too long - probably to an inappropriate age. I played make-believe until I was, like, 13 and probably should have been doing something else. But other than that, it's fun to be able to have to learn about different people.

In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to be to us as a charming dream.

When you're an actor, you show up and it's wonderful because you're in the world of make-believe.

The imagination is part of the arsenal that actors draw from.

Manchester Youth theater, then the National Student Theater Company, and later, my degree course, all helped form my love of telling stories and directing.