Kiefer Sutherland Quotes

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

You'd never play Hamlet if you started worrying about who's played it before you.

I'm not going to be able to play it like somebody else.

I'd rather do my own performance than copy someone else's.

I'm particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it's that area I'm very alive to. And I don't encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

The best thing an actor can bring to a role is himself - that's no secret.

I guess because you study the character and you do all those things. But when it comes down to it, it's still my performance, it's still my interpretation. I'm not going to, you know, be a clone - well, I was a clone of Richard Dean Anderson!

I used to watch everybody's stuff, but I found I would get slightly influenced by the other comics. I try to avoid it now.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

Actually I have to say when I'm acting, I try not to think about directing at all.

Go and see what others have produced, but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character.

I think the beauty of the film industry is that if another person tries to become another person or act like another person or imitate another person, they don't really get too far. When that person starts to realize who they are and what they can bring to the table, they start to blossom and grow. With that, it's not so much me looking towards my predecessors who have paved the way in the industry - it's more getting inspired. I get little bits and pieces of what I can take from any and everybody.

I'd always thought that acting was, like, you had to work really hard, you had to change the way you walked, you talked, and all of that. But that's not acting. That's shmacting.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances. And it's being able - I can't tell you how one does, but one tries to read those circumstances correctly.

If you're always looking at someone else, trying to imitate them, how can your natural gifts ever emerge?

Don't try to be just like some other singer hitting it big - find your own style and be honest in your performances. And never underestimate your audience.

You're not going to be able to look like anyone else, no matter how hard you try, unless you're a mimic, then you're not acting, you're just mimicking. You can't go on being John Wayne, that's John Wayne. So you're not going to steal from John Wayne. I'm not going to steal from John Wayne and you're not going to come back and say 'Didn't you get that from the circus?' You know. But he is one of those people who instructs me, whom I look up to - whom I think is one of the masters of his craft that I am so enamoured of.

The process of acting, not necessarily the business of acting, but the actual doing of it in the moment is my greatest kind of personal passion, the thing that brings me alive the most. Also, my two children.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.

As for me, the only stuff I've ever had success with is when I'm trying to be completely original and not thinking about mirroring what else is out there.

Acting is the only time when I truly maintain the spontaneity that I want to be present at all times.

It's hard work to find your own voice and not to copycat anything.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.