As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.
To voice something you're feeling and put observations into words with another person who is totally present is a creative act embodying soul and love.
Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.
When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M. P. s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.
Embodying your being is you earning your own being, earning your being in your body.
What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures (. . . ) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation.
Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.
When I start a movie, I already feel like I'm in it. I'm not a jobbing actor anymore; most of the films I do, I'm involved with development. Some, I've taken from scratch, and worked so heavily on the script, I'm embodying a lot of the character by the time I even get close to filming, because I've asked so many of the questions that I do. There is nothing better than being able to ask all the questions, do all the work. It's when you let it go that you fly.
