Jonathan Demme Quotes

Form must have a content, and that content must be linked with nature.

The world would be a better place if everyone learned to dance.

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

I'm not here to battle anybody. In the end it's just an instrument. That shouldn't be a concept.

What I do and what I dream include thee, as the wine must taste of its own grapes.

Think of a musical as a string of pearls. If you don't have a string, you can't put the pearls around your neck.

No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite.

We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.

Fashion is one big family.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.

My whole drive is to make sure that music is a common space where we search for beauty and share it. It needs to be louder than any conversation. That's where we have to go as a human race.

So every creative act strives to attain an absolute status; it longs to create a world of beauty to triumph over chaos and convert it to order.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

America is not a place. America is an idea.

It wasn't until my fifth or sixth book where I realized I'm trying to do the same thing in every story I tell, which is bring everybody together in the same room.

I admire my boss, Lorne Michaels. He never stops producing. I think, for him, comedy is a tool of compassion, a way of rallying people together and saying, 'Guys, isn't the world bonkers? Aren't we all just trying our best?' There's a tenderness in everything he does.

I sincerely want to help create beauty in the world and move a culture of separateness back towards community. I really, really do, and I think art is a powerful way of doing that.

I'm just trying to write things that resonate with people. And when we're all going through something together, I think you smile after that - I hope that people leave inspired after one of my shows.

I think art breaks down otherness.

Hollywood is an idea. It's not a real place.

'Walk With Me' was written really fast, and that one is about togetherness.

In a lot of ways, the Nocturnals are a safety net and a beautiful, beautiful blanket. All the life and music we've woven makes it so much more than a name on a marquee. But I realized the Nocturnals aren't me but a part of me... so it's natural to want to grow.

Art is a unifying language for all of us from across the world, and it transcends boundaries.