Carl Kasell Quotes

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

When I was younger, I was always willing to tell a joke and play out a scene. I would get sticks and pretend they were light sabers. I think it was just at a young age, I was so willing to jump up and perform a little play at the family picnic.

I didn't like Barbie dolls, so I used to have this overactive imagination, and I used to pretend to be all these different things. My weird childhood fetishes seem to have come to life now as an actor.

I used to dress up in my mom's old clothes and play with these kids from the neighbourhood and make up stories: I would pretend that we were all vampires.

When I watch my sons play, I think, God, acting's the most natural thing in the world. They take the 'Star Wars' characters and say, 'Let's pretend that I'm Hans and you're Luke and that we're on this planet,' etc.

I used to go outside every day and invent these elaborate worlds and scenarios in my head, and when I grew too old for playing pretend, I started to write everything down instead.

Kids don't plan to play. They don't go: 'Barbie, Ken, you ready to play? It's gonna be a three-act.'

I sort of make believe. That's why I like acting. You can create or imagine anything.

Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.

I have a dress-up chest at home. I love to create this fantasy kind of thing.

I like fantasy. I've always been the kind of kid who likes to dream about other things I could be and exotic situations I could be in.

I was in character all the time when I was little.

I would sit on the swing set and swing literally for two hours, just, like, imagining things. Like, what if this happened, and what if I was this guy?

I would come home and re-create every movie. Our backyard became a battleship, a war zone, a western town.

When I was little, I had this old video camera, and I set it up, and I would pretend that I was on comedy shows and soap operas and things like that.

As children, we did not have toys. We invented characters and animals; we invented stories.

When I was a child, one of my first games was a time machine which I made for my brother - a big box covered in silver and bits of cellophane. I'd close him up in it and joggle him and say, 'We're in Victorian times now... and now we're in Egyptian times, and I can see all these pyramids and pharaohs.'

I was an imaginative kid. My sister needed entertaining, whereas I was the one under the table playing with a bit of fluff on the carpet. I was the sort of child who would spend time rolling up balls of all different kinds of fluff and that would be my little family.

I'm just a big boy, I'm still just playing cowboys and Indians and astronaut and baseball player and all that stuff that I used to play as a kid.

It was like when we were little kids and we played games on the ivy-covered hillside in the backyard. We were warriors and wizards and angels and high elves and that was our reality. If someone said, Isn’t it cute, look at them playing, we would have smiled back, humoring them, but it wasn’t playing. It was transformation. It was our own world. Our own rules.

As a kid, I used to run around our garden waving a stick and pretending to be a million different people. That's why I became an actor, really.

You make kingdoms and castles on your own.

As a little girl I loved the thought of playing dress-up and getting ready.

I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.