Rainn Wilson Quotes

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.

Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.

When I started out as an actor, I thought, Here's what I have to say; how shall I say it? I began to understand that what I do in the scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It's almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it. You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it.

The reason I love acting is because I feel like acting is all about listening.

You need to become a good listener. As you're working, you hear someone else's lines and how you absorb them becomes your acting.

We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

I never took a photograph. Instead, I became a good listener.

All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening.

Acting lessons teach you to really listen to what the other person is saying because in acting it's all about responding to the lines.

When you're always onstage, you really have to focus on listening and reacting.

If you ask the right questions, you learn a lot about people.

I will never not take anyone's phone call.

Acting is about communicating, reacting, and sharing - and friendship is about all of those things, too.

If you can hear music, you can hear the musicality of the way someone speaks. It's easier to nail down the way that they talk. So much of it is listening, just like in acting. If you're listening, you pick up the nuance of why a person behaves the way that they behave.

What's important is to listen before you react.

I often have the feeling that acting is really not difficult, because all I do is I just listen. I just listen. I just listen to what there is. And if there's nothing, then I listen to nothing. If there's a chair, and it's empty, I listen to an empty chair, and I will respond to it.

In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train... I listen... More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.

You want to talk to someone; first open your ears.

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy. What that means is you want to devour lives. You're eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.

The most important thing is that we need to be understood. We need someone to be able to listen to us and to understand us. Then we will suffer less.

Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking our words more seriously and discovering their true selves.

The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate.