Toby Stephens Quotes

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do - that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

I know the benefits of having a really great improv show are amazing because it was this one rare and fleeting thing that was incredible, but the risk just didn't appeal to me. I liked the control of sitting down and writing things.

The great thing about being an actor in a film is that you're able to start knowing exactly where you're going to finish and really paint something in between. You can work to know the arc you need to build. Whereas in television, it is open-ended, and you're constantly guessing. There are pros and cons to both.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

With kiting, you have to land a trick, and in that instant you know whether you won or lost - I knew I could become the best in the world if I trained. But with acting, there are different variations; there's not a right or wrong way. It's so hard because it's so out of your hands. I have no idea what's going to happen!

Doing a musical is like having a kid. It's out there alive somewhere. It's not like a movie or a TV show where what we intended is what everyone will see. The kid can act out. The kid's going to do what it wants to do.

There's real drama in performing live. You never know how it's going to be.

To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

I don't think we've ever known what the hell's going on when we do Tap shows. It's possible the audience are effectively getting to see more of the movie when we play. You know, they know the songs, so anything we do onstage, whether we're meaning to or not, is an extension of the film. Other than that, I wouldn't understand what's going on.

I never tell an audience what they can expect. I never have, and I never will.

There's nothing obvious or predictable in acting. That's what it means to be in this profession.

When I'm in stage, I never plan, you know, 'I'm going to do this.' But of course, you have a concept what you're going to do. But you don't really plan it.

That's the great thing about filmmaking: Things happen you don't know are going to happen at the end.

Every movie I've ever made has just kind of come together.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Artists of all disciplines must be willing to go into the dark, let go control, be surprised.

You usually never know what you're going to do when you're making a movie.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.