I don't ask other actors questions. I think that's too intrusive. I just watch. I don't want to be constricted to an idea of what acting is by anyone else. I want to take my own education.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of independent learning and personal exploration in one's craft.
Leonardo DiCaprio expresses his belief in the value of self-directed learning and observation over seeking external validation or guidance from fellow actors. He feels that asking others about their process may limit his own understanding and creativity in acting, thus he prefers to observe and derive his own insights.
In practice
In a workshop about acting techniques, this quote could be used to discuss the importance of personal interpretation.
Mozambique is having an economic resurgence but still four out of 10 people there have HIV or AIDS...There's astounding conditions but what I was left with...was the power of the human spirit there and the fact these people have been through so much and they were still dancing in the streets
The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it. As for myself, I'm not really sure who I am. I change every day.
My career should adapt to me. Fame is like a VIP pass wherever you want to go.
I lived in Hollywood and, ironically, I didn't know you could just go out and get an agent and go on auditions and try and become an actor, I thought it was like a Masonic thing, like a blood line you had to belong to – until I was 13. Then I realised what you had to do. It is the one thing I know I want to do for the rest of my life.
As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.
Mother Earth is hurting. And she needs a generation of thoughtful, caring and active kids like all of you to protect her for the future.
For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
Network television has been attempting to lure viewers for years with its low-interest programming only to have those viewers discover later that their brains are bankrupt.
It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'
Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.
The rest, with very little exaggeration, was books. Meant-to-be-picked-up books. Permanently-left-behind books. Uncertain-what-to-do-with books. But books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.
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