Lennon Parham Quotes

I think part of that is to create an environment where it's like real life, where you don't really know what's going to happen to you in a certain scene.

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

I've always been taught to just play the truth of the situation. If comedy comes out of that, or drama, whatever comes out of it, at least I'm playing the truth of the moment-to-moment reality.

Acting is just being a man. Being human. Not forcing it.

Scripts are corny and predictable. Real life is always better.

I think that's the thing I learned at 'Saturday Night Live' - any time I would try and strategize, I would always, always fall on my face. Things worked out when I tried to make it about what I was feeling at that moment and what I was into in that moment of my life.

Personally, in real life, I'm a little more down-and-dirty than I am glamorous.

Improv as an actor makes you present in the moment. You listen, you're attentive. You're not acting so much as reacting, which is what you're doing in life all the time.

It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up.

The key to acting is less acting and just reacting.

If you're acting, then there's a prescribed way to behave; whereas in life, there's no prescribed way. So acting feels like a comfortable way to get through the day.

I come out of real life.

I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.

I like to believe that my actors are not acting. That whatever they are doing, or whatever has been said, would happen in real life.

I find that there's so much funny stuff in real life, and I am much more interested in super grounded, real stuff, so now I just want things to feel real and authentic.

I like to keep my films close to reality.

I don't like to know exactly what I'm going to do in a scene, because the most interesting moments as an audience member are moments of truthful spontaneity.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

There's not swelling music and emotional scenes in life, and there's not long pauses when you tell a joke for everybody to laugh. That's not how it goes. Life just sort of happens to you.

Life-actors never rehearse and need no script. A life-actor uses whatever he has available, nothing more, nothing less.

I think most of the actors that I know that I think are good are kind of funny people. There's just something about being alive to the truth of a moment that makes a good joke that also makes a good actor.

I never thought innovation as such was very important. Not when you have to think about it... If you're going to come up with a new direction or a really new way to do something, you'll do it by just playing your stuff and letting it ride. The real innovators did their innovating by just being themselves.

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

I'm not really a person who loves things that are surreal or not grounded in real life or reality. I like that - I want to find something that I can relate to and then maybe do a little bit more and embellish.

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.