Parts People Play Quotes

“People think that the South is racist, and it was, and some parts still are, but for the most part, we've dealt with our history. The biggest racists I've ever met aren't here, they're in politics, and they are smug bastards. They're the ones that are quick to play the race card, the ones that pimp poverty. Those are the real bigots.”

— Larry Correia

“Acting is not as difficult as you may think. People are born natural actors
and play many parts on the stage of life. Everyone is constantly in front of an
audience - or performing monologues when alone.”

— Bryan Michael Stoller

“The general conception that all actors are born exhibitionists is far from the truth. They are quite the opposite. They are shy, frightened people in hiding from themselves- people who have found a way of concealing their secret by footlights, make up and the parts they play. Their own self rejection is what has made most of them actors.”

— Moss Hart

“About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror.
Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.”

— Irving Howe

“America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.”

— George Saunders

“I learned a simple lesson about being awesome: always play to the size of your heart, not to the size of your audience. Awesome doesn't let the crowd determine the size of the performance. Awesome gets up for two people or 200. Awesome writes great books even if no one is going to read them. Awesome sweeps the parts of store floors that no foot will ever touch. Awesome can't help itself. Awesome has a huge heart. And that's what it always plays to. The size of the crowd doesn't matter. The applause of the audience doesn't matter.”

— Jon Acuff

“Maybe there are clusters of souls born again and again into the same repertory company, and with each new birth they play different parts in a different play. Or maybe it's the same play. This would account for those moments of Oh! there you are! After all, there are those people we like and dislike, there are those people we love, and then there are those we recognize. These are the unbreakable connections.”

— Abigail Thomas

“Everybody has parts of themselves that they're not 100% happy with - that's what makes you human. And being an actor, your job is to play human beings. Your job is to play real people.”

— Katie Lowes

“Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances-the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood-these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together.”

— Kim Stanley Robinson

“You like to assign roles to the people in your life. And when they don't play their parts right, you have a hard time accepting that.”

— Kasie West

“I spent six years touring the world playing Shakespeare, Molire, Shaw, Goldsmith ... But I slowly came to realise that the people you are working with are as important as the parts you play, and that there were lots of interesting people working in film and T.V.”

— Stephen Mangan

“I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.”

— Mike Nichols

“I haven't deliberately set out to play the blonde bombshell in my movies. In fact, it's probably been quite the opposite. After the success of The Mask, I wasn't offered all that many blonde bombshell parts, to be honest. I think people believed from the beginning that I could actually walk and talk at the same time.”

— Cameron Diaz

“I've had some marvelous parts, but I'm also asked to play characters who are kind of superficial people.”

— Holland Taylor

“It's not any desire on my part to start playing dads, but it's a convention of drama. If you don't get the parts of young people going out to nightclubs, you have to play their fathers.”

— Ian Hart

“People like to think that actors are terribly worried about ghosts of other actors in the parts they play. But you just have to get on with it.”

— Matthew Macfadyen

“It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“I've always done method acting. I'm a method actor, and I've done that for years. I never did acting and decided to take it seriously because all the parts people want me to do were playing the pretty role. If I want to play someone pretty, I'll play myself.”

— Jessica White

“People can have so many ill-conceived ideas about me based on the parts that I play. I've had guys, when I've been single, come out of the woodwork to date me and I've found out very quickly that they were expecting some kind of whirlwind, some dramatic crazy person - and that's just not me.”

— Jennifer Jason Leigh

“We benefit from doing nothing, from going out to play, from giving from the heart and spending time in nature. Most of all we benefit from having healthy, strong, and loving relationships with other people and from exercising the altruistic parts of ourselves.”

— Jo Ann Davis

“Who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play.”

— Alan Rickman

“There's a lot of people that I would love to work with. There's a lot of different kinds of parts I wanna play. As your career progresses, you hope that you get some more opportunity or some more choice.”

— Paul Dano

“I don't play long parts. They must be short parts, but they've got to be parts that mean something, that matter, where people will notice when I'm on the screen, and people will remember the character after they've seen the film.”

— Christopher Lee

“I find often in Hollywood there are many people who play themselves really beautifully. And certain parts are not that dissimilar from who you are as a person.”

— Carla Gugino

“There's a difference between the parts that I play and who I am and who people think I am. There's quite a big discrepancy sometimes between those things.”

— Martin Freeman

“The characters I tend to play are a little more interesting than the standard heroes. Romantic leads can be a little more straightforward, I guess. But it just seems to be the parts I get, I don't know what that says about me. I enjoy interesting characters and interesting people, I suppose.”

— Iwan Rheon

“If you do something and it proves to be a success, then people go 'get him to do that type of thing again, but only slightly different'. Either you do that or you go 'No! I want to play a leprous, lesbian dwarf from Guatemala!' But those parts just aren't coming to me.”

— Jack Davenport

“It was a wonderful life. To have a stage play right in this room, with real people acting real parts.”

— Jan Karon

“In a business that has exploited and ignored our people I have only found dead-ends. We need romantic comedies, gross-out and mockery comedies, horror and thrillers, teen movies and love-stories. All these and more will be a positive step towards the future of Native Americans in the world and film industry; an industry that that offers us not only the chance to play the parts of heroes, love interests and warriors, but also of villains, dorks and dangerous, brokenhearted products of circumstance.”

— Misty Upham

“I'm lucky that I got to start acting when I was so young, and people put me in these movies. A lot of people don't get to play these parts because they start a little older.”

— Nat Wolff

“Learn all you can about people in other parts of the world. Understanding how people in other countries live and work and play teaches us to respect them and promote peace everywhere.”

— Carol Bellamy

“It's only people who are hysterical who can play hysterical parts.”

— Sybil Thorndike

“I'm selfish, I think. I think an artist has to be. I'm not worried about what people think. I play the parts that I find interesting. It'd bother me more to be just pigeonholed into doing what people think is ethical or that's boring to me. I don't pick parts with that in mind, I just find interesting stories. If it's interesting to me, then I do it.”

— Denzel Washington

“The first role I ever played I had the lead and it's pretty much stayed that way, though people take great relish in calling me a character actor, which I am. There are a lot of short parts I could play, but I only do them when they are central to the idea of the movie.”

— Jack Nicholson

“I think you get the parts that people are comfortable with seeing you play. I get that. And I don't shy away from those parts.”

— Jason Bateman

“I was very lucky once I got started with a career. I happened to get some really good parts to play with some really good people to play with.”

— Morgan Freeman

“Writing a screen play with a group of collaborators is like the Lennon McCartney collaboration ... sometimes one or two people do more than others on certain parts of the process and vice versa.”

— Peter Jackson