Vincent D'Onofrio Quotes

The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.

We all learned how to walk and talk by interacting with our environment, with real goals and rewards.

I am convinced that living in an enclave shapes the personality, and living alone shapes the personality too.

I'm a good mimic.

People are confusing me with a good actor when I'm just a good mimic. When someone asks me to play a nun from the fifteenth century, you'll see what I mean.

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.

You act at being a man, and before you know it, you are one.

I'm not the best singer in the world; I'm just good at picking up what I want to sound like.

Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.

I have a unique ability to mock everything. I'm a sponge by nature, thats what my environment made me.

We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us: nor is it to be wondered at in children, who better understand what they see, than what they hear.

Everything that is true is authentic. When we were born, we did not have knowledge. As soon as we have language, we learn to describe everything through that language and we learn to be like our family, our parents, those at school, etc.

Children always tend to imitate everything that we are doing in front of them.

That's all life is, I guess. Just a bunch of riffs. Look at me: I'm wearing a tie. Why am I wearing a tie? It's because I saw an adult wear a tie and I thought, Oh, that's what people do. We're all just trying to be what an adult is.

The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency or how you react when someone is rude to you, that's you.

I have been 'absorbing' people - their voices, their mannerisms - all my life, to the point where I am a sort of Frankenstein of different people. My own speaking voice is, in fact, a mixture of how my two best mates speak, because they are cool, and I am not.

We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment's requirements - from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used.

My profession is to change myself according to my role and I work hard on it.

As a kid I used to wear my mother's dupattas and saris and emulate Hema Maliniji or Rekhaji in front of the mirror.

There is a very thin line dividing characterisation from impersonation. I've to make sure I don't cross over into mimicry.

It's difficult to adopt mannerism of a real-life person and even add the nuances of your acting into it.

I'm not saying that maybe there isn't a kid out there whose behavior hasn't been influenced by me in some way. I'm sure there is. But I can only speak for myself, and if you'd asked if my behavior had ever been affected by people I'd admired from afar, like musicians or footballers, that'd be a yes, totally. Right down to their hand gestures.

It took me a while to learn how to spell my own name.

I'm half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I'm Latina when they meet me. That's what made me learn Spanish.

When you're a child, and you're growing up, and you're mimicking a certain character, or you're trying to live and breathe a certain character on set for eight years that are also your formative years, you oftentimes take a lot of who you're playing into your real life and kind of become that thing.