I'm not suggesting that I have all the answers or that I have experienced everything someone else has. I'm a firm believer that everyone's life/spiritual journey is unique and personal, and I'm in no place to tell you what you have or have not experienced. However, I CAN tell you what I have experienced and learned, and I hope it is of use to someone out there.
I'm someone who's experienced impostor syndrome - as I think a lot of people have with their careers, especially when they pursue what they're passionate about, because they want to be good at it. I've experienced that as a gay man; I've experienced that as a cook, as a gallery director, as a student of psychology.
I didn't get jobs because when I went into the audition, I tried to be somebody else. I had to realize, what I can actually bring to the table is unique. No one else has experienced what I've experienced; no one else has walked in my shoes.
I certainly do attempt to live according to spiritual principles. That's always the foundation of each and every day. I have experienced some things in my life that just force me to believe in some sort of power. A creative . . . creative power source; however you want to phrase it. I certainly have experienced that presence. And I have experienced what I consider the basic, what we would call love and concern.
People who have experienced nothing love to tell stories while people who have experienced a great deal suddenly have no stories to tell at all.
Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.
Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.
After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.
Everything I've experienced, things that my friends have experienced and we talk about, things that are on the news - all aspects of life are in my message.
I feel like the world would be a better place if more people experienced a little bit of someone else's experience.
My mother and father taught me about black excellence and dynasty. They experienced racism personally, and when something like that happens to you and not around you, you develop a different perception than someone who has never experienced racism a day in their lives.
Everything I write is based on something I've personally experienced, or things that my friends have experienced that I just find horribly entertaining.
What we do every night is we change out the set list as much as we can to make sure that (fans can) go home and tell their friends they experienced something unique and cool.
I've experienced success, I've experienced failure, I've been a world champion, I've fought all over the world; I think I've experienced enough that I won't get in front of a million people and get gunshy.
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.
While I've been in Congress, I've never experienced a whiff of anti-Semitism. In my life, I have experienced very little.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.