A Quote by Spalding Gray

I'm the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I'm also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College, and I use that training to play myself.
I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.
All of us play different roles in our chosen career. I play the role of an actor. But I realised I am also an actor apart from various roles I play in my personal life.
I definitely consider myself a Method actor, because of my training. I might dispute what people consider a Method actor to be. For my money, a Method actor is an actor who has a technique. That has a method. And not one method, but whatever might be required. So a Method actor is always learning.
Theatre is an actor's medium though behind the stage there is a playwright, director and perhaps in some, a music composer too, yet the actor is the one who ultimately tells the story to the viewers.
Work with good directors. Without them your play is doomed. At the time of my first play, I thought a good director was someone who liked my play. I was rudely awakened from that fantasy when he directed it as if he loathed it. . . . Work with good actors. A good actor hears the way you (and no one else) write. A good actor makes rewrites easy. A good actor tells you things about your play you didn't know.
I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty; to interpret it his problem; and to express it his dedication. Being an actor is the loneliest thing in the world. You are all alone with your concentration and imagination, and that's all you have. Being a good actor isn't easy. Being a man is even harder. I want to be both before I'm done.
An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet. In the short span of his lifetime, an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible. He must be superhuman in his efforts to store away in the core of his subconscious everything that he might be called upon to use in the expression of his art.
I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press.
I've been training as an actor for six years. Nobody goes to acting school for six years. I mean, the college course is only four years! I absolutely trained.
As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.
I've never trained as an actor. I've always thought I'm not a good actor. I've been told I'm not a good actor by a lot of people.
I don't particularly consider myself an actor. I have no training. I love doing it, but I would never consider myself to be a colleague of an actual actor. That would be stepping way up in class on my part.
I live with someone, actor Peter Krause, who didn't find an interest in being an actor until the very end of college. So my message is: There's so much freedom left. There's no ticking clock. It's just not true.
An actor is an actor. There should be no labelling - mainstream actor, art film actor, serious actor, comic actor.
As an actor, I'm allowed - encouraged! - to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But I'll be damned if I can give myself permission to bring it out as a man.
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