Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The one thing people like about my show is it's universal. Everybody can relate to it. I think people enjoy going to a show and saying, 'Something like that happened to me.'

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

Attraction is what happens between you. It's not universal. And it's not conventional. And thank God for that.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

I write for myself; I'm trying to keep myself interested in the music. But at the same time, I want to make the songs relatable in a way; I want to keep melodies pretty simple and the lyrics open-ended so that people could maybe relate them to their own life in different ways. Something for everybody to have a piece of.

In the moment when you're doing a show, you're thinking of that moment, but you don't think of, 'Here's down the line how people will be relating to the characters.' There's something very universal about 'Sex and the City' that people are still tapping into, where every generation seems to be discovering for itself.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

I like to look at everything and appreciate seeing the different things that have meaning to people.

The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

There's this common sense idea that in order to appeal to the biggest number of people, you have to write something very general, but my experience is the more specific you make something, the more people respond to it, in a very odd way.

Somewhere, the audience relates to my characters and their vulnerability. I believe they see themselves in me.

If you try to create something that everybody can relate to, you're gonna make something that nobody can relate to.

Everyone connects differently with different things.

The truth of the matter is - when we look at things - every movie we do - no matter what the subject matter is - we go to the universal theme of family. We always go to that because if the movie is about family, then any audience can relate to it.

I think that, as a person, Beethoven talks to everyone in different ways.

I hope that my lyrics have a way that they're so specific they become universal, and they go, 'Oh I've been there, I know what that's like.'

You look at a song like 'Lightning Crashes,' and it's just so universal.

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.

I think unintentionally I gravitate towards concepts and topics that hit home or are something real we can all relate to.

I've come to realize that people connect more when they know you're telling them the truth or some aspect of your story, some mutated version of how you are experiencing this life.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that's very complex, or human.