A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
I do not communicate by words alone. In fact, rarely do I do so. My most common form of communication is through feeling. Feeling is the language of the soul. If you want to know what's true for you about something, look to how you're feeling about it... Hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth.
Coen brothers movies are not always what life looks like but it's definitely what life feels like.
You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.
An awful lot of filmmaking and playmaking is taken over by marketers and publicists, who set about to tell people what to think. And people feel safer that way. But it's not safe, and the whole wonderful thing that cinema and filmmakers can contribute is to go into the not-safe land of real life.
Everyone of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you.
We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.
I can't tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like.
Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.
I don't write happy songs. Who does? I don't know anybody who writes happy songs, really.
I just write songs that I strongly believe in and that are coming from inside. There's no tricks. It's honesty with big melodies.
Even when I'm playing a lawyer or a doctor, I want to play a person. A human being.
To be honest with my music... for me to expect anyone to connect it has to come from a place of honesty.
Even though I present myself at the height of glamour and beauty, part of my truth is being desperate and emotional and unafraid of being unattractive.
I prize something that feels authentic. It's an undefinable thing, but I know it when I see it, and I think audiences do, too. One of the reasons why 'Bloody Sunday' and 'United 93' work is because they felt real, felt truthful.
Honesty, vulnerability, pain - these are things that always supersede the trends of the day.
I consider myself a songwriter before anything else. The fact that I have been able to write both of my records and establishing myself as a songwriter is super-important to me. Some people have that gift, where they can take on anything and make people believe it. I like to do a song from personal experience.
It wasn't Liza Minnelli. It was the woman I loved.
I think film and television actually is a lot harder. Acting onstage is physically more arduous, but to get to emotional truth within a scene, it's much tougher to do it on film.
I think it has most to do with the way in which a story is told, whether it feels real either via the music of the telling or the 'honesty' of the story.
Wine brings to light the hidden secrets of the soul.
The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.
I remember hearing someone say that good acting is more about taking off a mask than putting one on, and in movie acting, certainly that's true. With the camera so close, you can see right down into your soul, hopefully. So being able to do that in a way is terrifying, and in another way, truly liberating. And I like that about it.
