Nicole Kidman Quotes

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

I think what actors have to do, what performers have to do to emotionally get to that place and have a camera and have your face 20 feet high on a screen, is such an incredible thing.

What actors need to do is to find a way to show people their despair, their joy, their pain, their exhilaration. All of these deep, deep emotional things - good and bad - so that if you're able to do that, then there's a kind of resonance that happens.

What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

You have to find actors who have the ability to display a wide range of emotion effectively. That's so much harder than it seems.

I'm just more attracted to actors. I like their choice to be artists - that's ballsy. And a guy who has such access to his emotional life is sexy. Or maybe because lots of the actors I know are so broken. I don't think I'm compatible with anybody I've dated. Maybe I'm so attracted to actors because I'm not ready for the 'settled down' thing yet.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Strength of character is already written. What we bring, as an actor, is an almost 3D-ness to it.

An emotional performance is usually more instinctive to an actor.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

I've been training myself and listening to other artists and seeing where their emotion comes from, singing a heartbreak song when they're in a happy relationship.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

I always noticed that in art school, that grief was considered more profound than happiness. But why?

That's the mark of a really great actor, when he can make you feel the emotion without having to search for it.

When a guitarist can evoke a certain mood through his playing, that's what's most important to me.

I can admire music where you feel the composer has everything organized and perfectly shaped, but it doesn't touch me. I like to feel that a composer is wounded, like all of us.

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Mozart's music is an invitation to the listener to venture just a little out of the sense of his own subjectivity.