Wes Studi Quotes

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

When you write a character and their dialogue, you can't help imagining how you would be acting if you were them. You kind of have to relate to all of them. It's the most personal thing I've ever done.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

There's a lot about the character. It doesn't always happen, but there are some characters you really create a relationship with, almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them.

I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

I remember in 'Pride and Prejudice' I had to do a scene where I broke down. And before we filmed I spent like three hours imagining my mum's funeral. Actually, she's very much alive, happy and healthy. It was really horrible.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

But in film you always watch situations or stories that you really have no relation to. A lot of times just because there's no personal connection doesn't mean you can't connect with the film or the characters in the film.

I really like getting inside the heads of female characters. I think I can do that well, and I enjoy it.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

I keep getting amazing things to bring to life. There's always something to discover with 'Dr. Bailey,' something that brings her home to the audience, something that makes people say, 'I know that woman. I work with that woman.' It's incredibly flattering and I'm still finding new things with her all the time.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

I channel a lot of my own personal relationships anytime I prep for something.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.