expressive storytelling Quotes

I come from an era, in my world, where you just had to define yourself as who you are and what you do. I happen to be an actor. I happen to be someone that loves to act, that also likes music, that also likes to speak, and that also has an opinion.

Ballet is important and significant - yes. But first of all, it is a pleasure.

I like the big bombastic singers, but I'm also very drawn to what I call character singers. They're people who obviously aren't very huge singers, but they've got this ability to tell a story and touch you emotionally without really using any kind of histrionics or special effects.

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

Ballet is more than a profession - it is a way of life.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

Generally when I'm filming something, I have a sort of exaggerated, comical, sort of grotesque version of the same scene running parallel in my head. With this process, you get to let it out of the box a little bit.

Style is not an end in itself, it is only a means to an end - the means of telling a story.

I just know that when I go onstage, I give everything I have, not only my feet, not only my legs, not only my body. I try to tell a story. Sometimes I am able to cry because I feel like it. Sometimes I am able to love because I feel like it.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with. My films come from my need to say a particular thing at a particular time. The beginning of any film for me is this need to express something. It is to make it nurture and grow that I write my script- it is directing it that makes my tree blossom and bear fruit.

Not too many songwriters, when they write songs go for broke. When someone does who's really good, it's astonishing. There's a reason a three-minute song can devastate you, or make you get up and dance, stop what you're doing and go, 'What is that?' It just hits you. And it's a very potent thing you're playing around with.

To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

I've never been able to tell jokes. In the beginning of my career I did impressions and jokes like any other comedian, but I was never very successful because I did it poorly. So I started to talk to the audience and started talking about the atmosphere around me and started to become angry, not in a mean-spirited way, but in a fun way - and my attitude developed from there.

There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about.

The big catalyst was seeing my sister, when I was 11, doing a dramatic recital. When I saw her on the stage and everyone listening to her so patiently, quietly, that's all I wanted: for someone to look at me and listen to me, but in some beautiful and artistic way.

I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

I don't think writers are any smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion.

I truly have a great love for an audience, and I used to want to prove it to them by giving them blood.

I learned to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and I learned to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act.

When you make drama you are like Picasso. Drama is whatever you want it to be.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.