Dramatic Representation Quotes

It's daunting to play a real living person.

I think that it's important not to take [acting] too seriously. It's all pretend. It's a strange job.

You had to make everything much more truthful for the camera. With the stage it's a given that it's going to be theatrical.

I am not trying to be a historian and a dramatist; I'm a dramatist, a dramatic historian, or one who does a dramatic interpretation of history.

I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either.… I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject.

Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action

I was excited by the idea of playing a Nazi.

The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

The hardest thing in the world to depict dramatically is stand-up.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

I wasn't trying to do a play or do what Kevin Spacey did. I was trying to do my own thing with it.

It's nice to sort of walk in and at least create the illusion that you are, or your character is, a well-rounded human being, a complete person. Especially when you're playing these impressive, high-functioning professionals. You feel like you have to come in sort of guns blazing.

I would compare it to an actor. I drive myself into the character that later on is in the ring.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

Actors don't act, we're just being in a different circumstance and scenario.

I believe in the theater; I believe in it as the first glamorizer of thought. It restores dramatic dynamics and their relations to life size.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

When you play a character that's someone real, when you're playing a true story, it's really great 'cause you're not pretending to make up some silly thing.

My only job as an actor is to try and understand the character and, to the best of my ability, bring this character to life.

As an actor, when you encounter a psychopathic personality, you naturally want to make him 'bigger than life,' as the Americans say.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.