Wes Bentley Quotes

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I love the possibility that anything can happen in any moment with acting. That you have the opportunity to experience lives and adventures that you may not have otherwise.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

If you have a very good concept of your character, you can snap into it.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

It's what still excites me most about acting: letting your imagination go places it's never been before. There's nothing better than that.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

The most fundamental important thing for me as an actor is maintaining a sense of play. It's so important.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I just love to act. I like to get away, totally play a different character, someone you can get really involved in knowing. I've gotten really involved in some characters and written down little summaries of where they live and what their families are like.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

I think acting is a fun thing because you get to have so many lifetimes in one lifetime, being all these different people.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

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

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

Looking at acting, in the movies or the theater, and the way I like to look at it, it's just an extension of childhood play... Kids play and imagine in a very intense fashion and they don't need any director telling them, 'You really have to believe in it.' They believe in it completely.