A Quote by Karen Black

I like to watch people. For example, people at the airport... What is interesting about them is that they dont know what they are like. People at airports are the most brilliant actors in the world, because their attention is elsewhere, and they are idiosyncratic. I like to imitate people. I walk behind them and imitate their backs.
Acting really started for me because I was in a house full of adults. They never shielded their lives from me. They were adults going through this world doing what they had to do. I used to like to watch them and imitate them. They all have their own distinct personalities; even though they're family, we couldn't be more different people.
The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.
As actors you have this trait to imitate very easily. I don't want to imitate anything or limit myself of finding this creature, this woman because I'm looking at magazines and I'm reading comics, and I'm asking people that are avid readers of The Guardians.
When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish - people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people - and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.
Shatrughan Sinha's career lasted because people could imitate his dialogues. You cannot be a mass superstar if people don't imitate your dialogues.
Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.
If we wish to imitate the physical sciences, we must not imitate them in their contemporary, most developed form; we must imitate them in their historical youth, when their state of development was comparable to our own at the present time. Otherwise we should behave like boys who try to copy the imposing manners of full-grown men without understanding their raison d' être, also without seeing that in development one cannot jump over intermediate and preliminary phases.
I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?
It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know-which is the price of your performance and survival-you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you.
One thing I do like about L.A. is the fact that you can be - whether you're famous or it's just a matter of, like, seeing people you know all the time on the street, you can be pretty anonymous and walk around and, like, not run into people, because it's such a big city and because a lot of people drive.
I understand that actors lose their looks, they change over time, but people don't lose their talent. I think that, as people get older and the people who make the decisions get older, they don't like hiring people much older than them because it reminds them of their fathers, and they don't like telling people older than them what to do. It makes them uncomfortable. I think that happens a lot.
They (children) are my teachers. I watch them and I learn. It is important for us to try and be like them and imitate them. They are golden.
Study the habits of the people you want to be like and then imitate them. If they are succeeding, they must be doing something right.
It's interesting in American culture. We like to build people up and then push them off the pedestal, and then we want to see them come back. Like Britney Spears, and a lot of people, it's what we do, and it's not like that in other parts of the world.
If you skate with an Olympic level skater, they make you so much better because you're skating behind them, and you're trying to imitate their stride and their stance. It's like having the world's greatest training wheels.
I like to watch actors while they are acting, how they hold their attention when so many people around are there to distract them. It's difficult.
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