Devendra Banhart Quotes

To achieve the intimacy between performer and audience in storytelling, I feel like I have to let the audience in on my emotional state, not just, "Here's a story I'm going to tell by rote, and you're just going to listen to it, because I'm such a wonderfully entertaining fellow." It's the idea of sharing enough of myself that it's not just all about, "Look at me, look at me." There's an element to it of, "You understand what I'm talking about, right? You've been in this place that I've been in," which makes it a richer experience.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

I'm just basically spillin' out my emotions to the world. 'Cause rap is about emotion. And I want you to feel what I'm feelin', 'cause that's what it's all about.

Country music busts the wall between performer and audience. There's a connection because there's a vulnerability, a confessional quality, to so much of the songwriting. Those lyrics take you in.

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.

Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.

People have allowed me into their homes, through my words and my music.

That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.

I always want people to experience the feelings I am experiencing. Anything I can do to get you to feel, that's an honor and a duty that I take very seriously.

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

When I talk to the camera, mate, it's not like I'm talking to the camera, I'm talking to you because I want to whip you around and plunk you right there with me.

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.

When you hear my music and you feel the emotion, it's real. When you see me in a film and you see a tear, it's real.

I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people.

Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

I feel like 'Beware' is a heartfelt song - it's something that is definitely a story, something that I cultivated from personal stories, some from just other stories in just wanting to make a good song.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

The thing about storytelling is it's very stripped down; it's very much at the core of 'I'm a person and I'm just telling you this thing, and I need you to trust me and believe that what I'm saying is true, and if you believe that what I'm saying is true then we are connected to each other.' I think there's something really beautiful about that.

I love intimacy, always, of performing.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

I like to see people's eyes when I'm singing to them.