Stephen Sondheim Quotes

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

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

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

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.

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.

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.

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

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

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

I love acting. It's an interesting challenge to make something that doesn't exist appear like it's happening, and to do it in a real way.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

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

I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.

I think when you're in the middle of a piece of work, there are things that bleed over into your life. You're spending a large portion of your day pretending to be somebody else, to tell somebody else's story.

We have to be able to use our imaginations to make the character's experiences real to us.

With any character, you have to put part of yourself into it because we are the soul that brings that character to life.

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.

All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody 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 like to play people that are real, a real person, and then something that's interesting with that person. I think it's a lot more challenging to do that than something that's extremely fantasy-like.

I love the creating part of taking on a character. It is fun to be another person and create what it would be like to be that person.

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.

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.