Annette Bening Quotes

I do this acting thing mostly for myself. I like to make a connection and communicate with the audience to make myself feel less lonely. I also do it to develop my own character, so sometimes I do it to just be away in a certain area that I've never been to. But mostly, the story has to do something for me.

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

Acting is always therapeutic.

Well, I think that in every character there are little bits and pieces of yourself.

I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.

Every once in a while, I'll have an acting role that allows me to look at something in my life and work it out.

Every character brings new light to a different part of myself, which is something I love about every role I get to play.

It's hard to say what you learn acting a part. You find bits and pieces of yourself that are inside the character you play. You locate the relatable aspects of that character to your own life. So, in a way, every part you play forces you to discover things about yourself you might not have learned otherwise.

One of the nice things about acting is that it allows you to open up to the other people within you.

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?

I've always used my own personal emotions and things that I've gone through in my life to build a character. The work that I do before a film feels almost like therapy, between me and whoever I'm playing.

I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it. Either the character helps you discover that element of you or the other way around, where that element of you helps you discover the character.

It's how I express myself - through storytelling and characters. They often reveal very intimate, vulnerable sides of myself.

Whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you've never felt comfortable with, or never knew about.

I'm interested in pursuing roles that allow me to push against my own walls, my own constraints as a human being, and to find out where I'm capable of going. In real life, I'm not very good at feeling emotions, so I like to do it through my work.

I always used to pretend to be different characters - cowboys, that sort of thing. I used to think that the Indians lived over the mountains that I could see out of my bedroom. As I grew up, I started to understand that acting was actually a craft, and there was no question about it, that was exactly what I was going to do.

I kind of stumbled into acting, even though I've always been fascinated by people and kind of their motives, and it's been amazing to me, everything I read before about psychology, philosophy, just to put it into practice somehow.

You'll always end up filling out a character. It might be with aspects of yourself.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing.

The story of 'Lasers' is my story. I didn't have to look too far to get subject matter for this record; it was stuff that was happening to me.

The thing is, about a character, it's not about being right, it's about the truth. The truth comes from within, so you have to search as an artist for the truth.

The art of transformation is a very important thing to me, and I always believe I can say something more truthful through characters that are further away from me.

At the end of the day, you have to find the humanity in you in each character.