Diana Penty Quotes

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

You're creating a different world and the actor's job is to be able to convince the audience to enter into that world, whether it be actually something that you recognize from your own life or not.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

I love the creating part of taking on a character. It is fun to be another person and create what it would be like to be that person.

Something that I really enjoy doing is creating and being a part of very different characters and very different projects.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

I was very intense. I think it's a privilege to be an actor.

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 just love to be able to actually build a character.

The whole point of being an actor is to get satisfaction out of a role - unless you're just vain about celebrity. You're always looking for the one thing that will surprise you.

The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

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

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.

I think that's why I'm an actor: so I can tell those stories without having to really live through those stories with real consequences and real stakes, real responsibility.

I distinctly remember watching Daniel Day Lewis in 'My Left Foot,' and my parents were discussing the fact that he's an actor. To me, it was a foreign concept. I was like, 'Someone is pretending to do that? That's so awesome!' After that, it just stayed in the back of my mind.

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.