Constantin Stanislavski Quotes

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

Well a good writer writes, a good musician listens to a lot more than he actually composes, and if you're going to do lyrics - well, there's a Freudian slip. That's not even a slip, that's a Freudian move: I said going to do lyrics. If you really want it to ring true, you'll live it first. Go really get your heart broken!

I don't think I”m a very good actor. Everything is very tentative and at a certain point you click in and just feel the spirit move you. I can be possessed really well.

The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.

You don’t need help to write a song. You just need to get over this experience that bummed you out so bad. The relationship you were in is over, it was over a long time ago, and you need to move on.

I just mix and put things together the way the spirit moves me.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you

When I'm writing I've been playing something for a couple of hours and I'm almost in a trance. At two or three in the morning you can actually see bits inspiration floating about and grab them.

To survive, each sentence must have, at its heart, a little spark of fire, and this, whatever the risk, the novelist must pluck with his own hands from the blaze.

Inspiration, move me brightly, light the song with sense and color, hold away despair

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.

I know when I'm onstage, I don't think about how it looks, I just concentrate on really feeling what I hear. But I totally know I look like Gollum when I perform, so it's cool.

The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.

All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.

Love is both a principle and an emotion; it is something both felt and willed. It is capable of almost infinite degrees. Love in the human heart may begin so modestly as to be hardly perceptible and go on to become a raging torrent that sweeps its possessor before it in total helplessness.

The creative man with an insight into human nature, with the artistry to touch and move people, will succeed. Without them he will fail.

If some event happens and it seems really important to me and moving to me, I'll write it down in my lyric book knowing that it will come out in a song.

When inspiration and emotions are sudden, and you can truly capture something, then, yeah, of course it feels good. But when you’re stunted, and you’re having trouble expressin’ yourself, then obviously it doesn’t. So it’s never constant.

In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

I'm delighted when people respond with passion and readily intensity to my work. Literature is not as the economist would put it a positional good; in other words, there is infinite space for good literature.

One never paints violently enough.