Voice Inflection Quotes

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

I didn't change my voice for 'The Boondocks.'

There's something in my voice tonally that's like a boy, so I started being able to do boy voices and to be known as having a naturalistic boy tone without pushing it.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

An accent in a way can be an entry into a character.

Voiceover work, I really enjoy. I don't get to do too much of it, but I've been doing more lately, and I like it because you get to do a bunch of options, one after the other, and you can go as big as you want or as small as you want, and you don't think about it sometimes.

I never noticed my voice. I did become aware as a little kid at camp that I liked doing accents. We'd do plays and skits, and I realized I loved speaking in voices that weren't my own.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

When I give a speech, I tell it like a story.

I had to change the shape of my own voice. It was quite hard to pull off and so once I had it, I stayed in Hitchcock's voice all day on set.

You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out.

I always had a problem when I did the audio books myself because they weren't made to have me doing all the voices. And to hear established actors, and you think, 'Wow, that sounds like it's supposed to sound,' is great. They've got the right inflections, which is an enormous skill.

You should hear the guy who dubs me in Japan. I like him the most. He has a high squeaky voice.

I'm happy to do voice-overs. I always have a good time doing them. I like to explore vocal nuance and accents and different people, different personalities. In a way, it is a lot more freeing than having your face up there.

I think reading an audiobook is a real skill - for one thing, you have to be able to do impressions and voices, which I cannot do - and it's just not a skill I have.

I've always wanted to be a voice actor. Well I think at first I wanted to be a singer. Then in middle school I auditioned for a musical and I only really cared because I wanted to sing in it. I had to act as well as part of the audition and that was the first time I ever really acted, and I was like 'Oh hey, this is fun, I like doing this.'

In oratory the will must predominate.

When I watch an actress say a line, I watch how they deliver the lines with gestures.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

When I'm acting, there are moments where I'm thinking, 'I sound like my mom when I say that,' or, 'I sound like my dad when I say that.'

I always change my words in everything I do. I make the language fit, because I know the character from the inside out. Often character actors are not in a position to do that, but I do it. I don't change any cue and I never change anybody else's lines, but I make my own words fit my mouth.

If I'm doing a voice-over session, like animation or something, and I'm doing three different voices, you've gotta separate them. You've gotta find the different places and do your different things.

There are actors who can pull of a writer's lines; I am not competent enough to do that.

A great speech is literature.

I've not been called on to do a lot of accent work.