Allen Tate Quotes

When something is dramatized, it provokes a much more emotive response than just hearing a story on the news.

It is very easy to make clear what you want a film to say, but I did not wish to engage in overt propaganda, even for the right cause. I wanted to create an experience through the films, something where people could have the freedom of their own response to them.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

Acting, when it is good, can be transformative.

Drama is a complete meal, vitamins, proteins, carbohydrates. It's a slow burn thing. It's got an arc. Comedy is more like coke.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.

In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

Film is an emotional medium; it's not a logical medium. It's not an intellectual medium, so every decision you make as a filmmaker and an actor has to be emotional in some way, even in the rejection of logic.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

Combining music, theater and comedy is a new and broader form of expression. In certain combinations you can make people laugh one moment, cry the next, and then be astounded by the beauty of the music.

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.