A Quote by Mary Steenburgen

Acting was far from my world. I rarely saw a play. I never met a real actress; they seemed unreal. — © Mary Steenburgen
Acting was far from my world. I rarely saw a play. I never met a real actress; they seemed unreal.
In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked.
All that you are attached to, all that you love, all that you know, someday will be gone. Knowing this, and that the world is your mind which you create, play in, and suffer from, is known as discrimination. Discriminate between the Real and the Unreal, the known is unreal and will come and go so stay with the Unknown, the Unchanging, the Truth.
Dreams are real. This is unreal. This world is unreal. Everybody has it backwards. This is the dream. This is an insubstantial pageant. Nothing here lasts - that is how you know it's the dream.
Three of my childhood dreams went unfulfilled. I never saw a no-hitter, never saw a triple play, and never caught a ball that had been hit into the stands. But I did see the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in a World Series game when I was 10.
Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.
All looked distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away, unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something receding in which one has no longer any part.
Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.
You want to be able to really tackle a character and make it a fully-dimensional human being who is complicated, funny, and all the things that a person could be. If you can achieve that, you feel great. You so rarely get to do that as an actress in general, but as a black actress, it's almost never.
I don't like acting and I never have liked acting and I never wanted to be an actress.
We human beings instinctively regard the seen world as the "real" world and the unseen world as the "unreal" world, but the Bible calls for almost the opposite.
My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that's how I began studying.
I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.
What I thought was unreal now, for me, seems in some ways to be more real than what I think to be real, which seems now to be unreal
All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.
All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.
I wouldn't be an actor if it weren't for the English teacher I had my junior year in high school. She's the one who told me I could be an actor. I had never met an actor, I had never seen a real play, only high school plays. I didn't know actors were real, that it was a real job.
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