The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
William TrevorRead
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the deep immersion required in character acting, where understanding and empathy for the character's perspective is essential.
William Trevor's quote highlights the transformative process of becoming a character in acting. It suggests that to portray someone authentically, an actor must develop a profound understanding of that character's inner life, fears, and motivations, almost to the point of invading their personal space and thoughts. This level of empathy and connection is what separates surface-level acting from a truly powerful performance.
Themes
ActingCharacterImmersionEmpathyPerformance
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a drama class to inspire students to delve deeper into their characters.
More from William Trevor
All quotes →My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
William TrevorRead
I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.
William TrevorRead
People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
William TrevorRead
Similar quotes
I don't really know why an idea comes to me. But all of a sudden, an idea comes and from experience I can intuit what something means when an interesting line pops up. Or I can intuit what an interesting choice might be. And I can try a couple of different choices, and see which one feels right, and then continue the song to see where it goes.
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.
Neil GaimanRead
There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.
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If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.
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[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Gustave FlaubertRead
Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.
Richard AvedonRead