Alan King Quotes

When I would be on the stage singing, I would see a movie of something that happened, I would be telling the story. I would be describing the story in sound, but my goal would be to make somebody else run their own movie.

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

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

In a weird way, I live vicariously through the characters I play as an actor.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

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.

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.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.

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.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

I'm not saying that I am all of my characters, but for me to bring a character to life, you've got to be able to find your own truth.

It's always interesting - how do you actually convey thought through song? We're used to the convention on stage. In film, we used to be used to it, and now sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. You need to be fresh and really look at the material.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

Each of my Shakespeare pieces is different to the other, but each espouses a set of philosophies common to all my theatre work.

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

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along.

One of the things I like about acting is that, in a funny way, I come back to myself.

When I'm writing a song, I try to be the character.

The reward is that you can actually create a world separate from reality with a story, actors, music, and camera design. When it works it can entertain, move people and teach us all.

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.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

One of the pleasures of being an actor is quite simply taking a walk in someone else's shoes. And when I look at the roles I've played, I'm kind of amazed at all the wonderful adventures I've had and the different things I've learned.