Rhys Ifans Quotes

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

I look at rap as an opportunity to act. My head is full of different characters - in each song I'm auditioning a character.

There is something special about being an actor and able to bring somebody's visualisation - director, storywriter and script writer - into life. It is almost like creating a person.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

Acting makes you look at life and try to understand it in a beautiful way.

I think acting is a fun thing because you get to have so many lifetimes in one lifetime, being all these different people.

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.

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

That's why I'm an actress - escaping into a world.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

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

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

For me, acting is like a therapy. I can express myself fully when I am acting and have blood in my veins. Even when I'm not working, I'm always living in my own world, imagining characters.

I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Acting has always been such escapism for me.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

At first, being a storyteller, it was fun to dress up and fun to sing songs and pretend to be very dramatic - all of that stuff was just fun early on.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

I try not to think too much about where my voice comes from. I'm channeling characters and emotion to come up with beautiful words that tell a story.

That's part of the beauty of being an actress: you get to explore different facets of what it is to be a human being and what it is to explore different personalities, and actually, that's one of the things I love about it.

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.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.