A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm not the best actor I can be, so I'm just working on it. I'm not the quickest reader in the world but when I get an acting book I can read it in two days.
The trouble is, being an actor, you're always being sent scripts, so you've always got something to read. You've always got about three scripts to read, that you have to read, all the time. So finding a book or getting into a book series is hard, especially for me.
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.
As an actor, my main focus is finding good writing and attacking a good role.
I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.
Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.
If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.
My life has been the antithesis of that book 'The Secret'. I've always been interested in doing what I do. I love storytelling and I really enjoyed acting, but it never seemed like a realistic thing.
You cannot study acting in books. Do it, do it, do it. And watch good actors. See what they are doing and how they are doing it. You have to practically participate, I think, in order to develop yourself.