Colin Hay Quotes

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

I wanted to be an actor. That was my real goal. But I wasn't any good at it, so I wrote my own material and acted through that. That's my idea of fun. I get to be all these things in the songs.

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

Acting requires a great amount of empathy for real lived human experiences.

I played Mary at the age of seven in my first nativity play, and I loved it - there is something so fascinating about embodying someone else.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

I always do make a back story for myself, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I just like to.

What I really like doing is storytelling, finding the body language that is necessary for the story. And when I'm doing it and it's working, I'm thrilled.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.

I like to build a character, trying to stretch my imagination as far to the walls of my brain as I can to come up with something that feels truthful and feels real - as close to the skin as I can get it.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.

One of the amazing things about writing fiction is that you do get to be other people.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I still love finding the soul of the characters I play and defining who they are. This to me is my paint set, and the colors are always exciting to choose.

You know, I remember watching Morgan Freeman when he did the two Alex Cross movies, and he's so confident that he's going to knock the scene dead. And I'm really confident that I can tell a good story now, so I just don't worry about things.

I had spent my childhood making up adventures in my head. Then I realized when I went to acting school that there were adventures written down, and you could learn lines, and you could do the adventures for real, not just in your head.

I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.

The good and wonderful thing about my whole career is that I've always felt that the audience, if I do it well, will track wherever I go, whether it's President or a lawyer or bad guy or good. All I have to do is execute the material enough where they buy into it. I've had the great luxury of the audiences accepting that.

I think that you have to find a piece of yourself in every role you play. If you don't believe what you're doing, you cannot expect anyone else to believe it.

I've always been drawn to stories and telling them; whether it was through being a part of theater when I was a little kid, or film, or with music, there's just been an innate desire to feel that connection.

You bring a little bit of yourself into every character you play. We're multifaceted creatures.

I just let the work speak for itself. An actor is not afraid to take risks; to put on different hats; to be a good guy, a bad guy, a victim, an abuser. There are all kinds of people in the world, and playing them is what acting is all about.