A Quote by Kevin Spacey
My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.
Related Quotes
An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.
The most important definition of an actor, the job of the actor, is to serve the writer, not yourself. Way too many actors serve themselves.
My dad was a lovely guy. I had great parents. But he was a conservative shopkeeper, and he said, "Look, I don't know how to help you as an actor, but if you want to be an actor, give it a go for a year. Get a job. And if you don't get a job, then we're going to reevaluate and you're going to go back to school." And I thought that was a fair thing.
You make yourself available to the movement. At that point, for example, battered wives were not on the top of anybody's list. It was, "What did you do to provoke him? Why would he do that to you?" Stuff like that. I called the hotline, and I said I was available to help get orders of protection. I would help do whatever needed to be done, serve their papers. Many times, they'd go to court, get their papers, and then be afraid to serve them on the guy. So that was one source of income. But I took anything that came across my doorstep.
As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.
When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.
To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
I try to use the attention that I get to help and to serve, and that's really what I'd see as my work - to serve my community, serve the planet, serve my family. And I think a celebrity is someone who draws the attention on themselves, and then it kind of stops there.
When you have somebody writing or acting for you, you have to be free to have them hate you so you can get your ideas across without worrying.
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.
I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing.
Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.
There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.
I'm proud of my ability to understand what somebody else is trying to do and help them achieve it, because part of the aesthetic of improvisation is service. You never say no. Serve the servant, follow the follower. And that's very valuable in your life, as well as very valuable in your actor's work. I'm damn proud of my ability to help other people achieve their ideas.
The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.
I do not hold that because the author did a bad job of writing the player need trump it with the same kind of acting. When I go into a picture I have only one character to look after. If the author didn't do him justice, I try to add whatever the creator of the part overlooked.
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