Stella Adler Quotes

Animators can only draw from their own experiences of pain and shock and emotions.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

Most of my songs aren't about me. They're about stuff I've seen.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

I think in many ways, I'm sort of a blank canvas, because in many ways, I'm just observing the world and the people around me and their characters and letting them kind of explode off me and to find out why they're doing what they're doing. But then every once in awhile, I get to take on a whole new character.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I have always believed that an artiste needs to respond to a story first. One has to feel it in order to live it.

Most of my work - including everything from my own comics to the covers I've drawn for 'The New Yorker' - is the result of taking some personal experience or observation and then fictionalizing it to a degree.

When I'm given a role, I'm consumed by a passion to bring to life a character that exists only on paper. I mull over the character for days and internalise his feelings.

The idea is that what an artist lives through should broaden his notion of what it is possible for a human being to live through, and that new understanding should then get into and expand the work.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.

Sometimes, you can incorporate things that you've experienced in your life and use that. And, other times, you just know what that feeling of hurt, love, anger and depression is, and you do whatever it takes to get there in your mind, and use it to your advantage, whichever way it works best.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

Nobody can put a character on paper without - at any rate in part and at times - sitting as a model for it himself.

A director is a man, therefore he has ideas; he is also an artist, therefore he has imagination. Whether they are good or bad, it seems to me that I have an abundance of stories to tell. And the things I see, the things that happen to me, continually renew the supply.

Sometimes my lyrics may describe a situation that happened to a friend. Other times, I create a story from the ground up.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

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

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

I have to live my books before I write them.

I think journalists and filmmakers are keen observers. And actors must also be sharp observers as they draw their characters and their stories from what they experience around them. After all, that is what actors, filmmakers, journalists are trained to be: observers. And then they do something with their observations.