Sarah Paulson Quotes

I am a very active audience member. I want to be moved. I want to be confronted. I want to feel.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

There are certain artworks that I respond to, artists that I respond to. It's an intellectual reaction but it's also a biological reaction. And the excitement that the work can generate - how it makes you feel about not only your intellectual possibilities but your physical possibilities in this world. How it feels to be alive!

I've never really been met with indifference, where they say, 'Who cares?' I think that's what good art is supposed to do. It's not supposed to make you feel good about your own prejudices and your own values; it's supposed to open you up in some way and get you outraged or make you happy or make you sad or whatever it's going to do.

The beauty of any artwork is that it becomes the person that's watching it: What do you take out of it?

People are buying only one thing from you: the way the engagement (hiring you, working with you, dating you, using your product or service, learning from you) makes them feel.

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page.

As a viewer, my own work elicits strong emotional reaction from me.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

If art doesn't move people, then art has failed.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

When I watch a film, I watch it as an audience instead of thinking as an actor or an intellectual. I see whether it made me laugh, get involved or shocked me at certain points. Something has to stir inside me.

I want art to make me think. In order to do that, it may piss me off, or make me uncomfortable. That promotes awareness and change, or at least some discussion.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

That's my mission: to make you feel something.

I'd rather create something that gives people a very strong reaction than create a show that someone looks at and says, 'Hmm. Fine.'

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.

For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.

The pictures which do not represent an intense interest cannot expect to create an intense interest.

I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.

You want people to think. You want people to be emotionally moved. And there's a theory behind that in terms of storytelling. It has been around for thousands of years. And that's where something like live theater or a live performance is something that is very valuable because you get instant feedback from your audience and you kind of know the things that work and the things that don't work.

I'll go and see anything so long as it amuses me, or moves me. If it doesn't do either I want to go home.