David Mamet Quotes

There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.

As an actor, you go in your own personal life and pull from your personal life, so that's what I do.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

I think every character I play definitely has parts of me. I can't ever play someone that's completely different to me.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

As an actress, it's part of your job to be able to imagine just about anything - even if it's not within your personal experience.

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

I had no real experience studying acting; I came to it having done other things for a living for many, many years, and I have this gigantic respect for experience and technique.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

I write from my life, my experience. I'm selfish that way.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.

Film acting has been a very pure experience, because you have to give the purest form of yourself as an artist.

Great actors try to dismiss all ideas from their conscious mind in order to provide an experience that is real.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

There are always parts of me that come out in the characters that I play - it's the only thing I have to work with and to draw off of.

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

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.