Aldous Huxley Quotes

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Forgive me, but what is the purpose of drama but catharsis?

I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you're wrong, you're soppy, sentimental.

All the best parts of art come from pain turned to celebration.

We all have an escape. Mine was theater.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

I wish to please the people, but I want to make them cry, perhaps. There, I have said it.

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.

I learned a long time ago from David Mamet to wipe your feet at the door, get it out on stage and then go about your life.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Acting is a way of living out one's insanity.

It was difficult for me to feel my feelings, so I just buried them. Then I found that acting was a way for me to get them out. But now that I'm a reasonably sane adult, acting is more about my trying to engage other people: Acting is cathartic for the viewer as well.

Music is escapism, it's entertainment.

Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.

Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.

I feel like songwriting, for me, is kind of therapy.

Kitsch parodies catharsis...It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts.

A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

If I'm able to catch the screening, there's a point in the film where, like clockwork, a portion of the audience gets really emotional and begins to cry. And that's very difficult to make happen.

Art is like a fart for the soul. Better out than in.

When the music hits, you feel no pain, to quote Bob Marley. But it’s true. It’s like all art and creation: You’re completely in the moment, and you just feel free.