Bob Greene Quotes

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.

Sometimes I've found that by getting into a certain drag, or a certain feeling, you can cast off your mortal coil and really do something. I don't know if it's important, but it's something. It's entertainment.

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.

I've joked that I would have either become schizophrenic or an actress, but as an actress you can do both.

One of the great pleasures of acting is surrendering to someone else's point of view of the world - living inside a character and a story that never would have come out of your mind or heart.

A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.

My music is a very personal reflection of me, whereas, acting a role, that's a reflection of another character.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

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.

Acting is what I do with who I am.

A rap dude has his rap persona, his hyper version of himself. Do you know Method Man's real name? Or Elton John, Marylin Monroe? You make up this character. That's kind of what we have done with Die Antwoord, playing with characters.

Acting, when it is good, can be transformative.

We are not brain surgeons. We are not curing cancer. We are not finding the next cure for Alzheimer's. We are simply and merely entertainment. We take on and wear the masks of characters. That's what we're paid to do.

I love people who expect me to wear great, feathery costumes- and I do it. It's like an actor getting into his costume for his part. I don't really feel that part until I'm into whatever I'm going to wear.

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

I would like the whole world to be full with authentic art, throbbing with it, living with it, because that is the only way: through authentic art, real art, you transcend it. If the music is real, soon you will move into meditation, because the music will only give you a little glimpse of meditation, nothing more.

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

You are an artist. What work of art will you leave behind?

We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.

Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.