John Hillcoat Quotes

With dancing, so much is about sexuality and sensuality and without life experience it becomes much more of a performance, rather than a living, breathing entity from the soul.

With music, you're really showing someone a piece of your soul. You're saying, 'This is mine. I wrote this, I made this, I'm performing this. This is how I'm presenting it to you.' There's something really scary about that, but there's also something next-worldly about it, too.

I hope they see the genuine side of me, of my music, of my voice. I hope that they feel me. I hope that what I sing and what I say really gets across to the viewer because everything that comes out is true.

My work is intensely personal.

I've turned down a lot of arena dates because I've done the big-arena thing. Now, I want to do something where people can feel me and I can feel them.

When you watch a movie, you don't want to feel like a machine made it. You want to feel a soul.

You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.

That's something that I think the best artists retain - the ability to invite you into their small, intimate inner space, and let that be what radiates.

'Before I Ever Met You' was the first one to come out and that just dives into the grit, and it's pretty graphic about a relationship. For my first song, it was very special the way it happened, because I didn't really hold anything back, and people responded to it.

You always gonna feel me. That's my main thing. When I'm speaking in my music, you gotta feel me.

I like the sounds of real, living, breathing musicians. When a real person plays something, there's a soul. They're giving you their emotions.

There is an emotional aspect to live players that, no matter how good the samples are, you cannot replicate.

I didn't want to lose the human scale.

This may be the age of automation, but love is still being made by hand.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.

I have the great privilege of being both witness and storyteller. Intimacy, trust and intuition guide my work.

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.

I just try to be true to myself and write about things I'm passionate about. I think what most people don't like about movies is they can tell that most movies are a product, and they don't mean that much to the people who make them.

I take making music seriously, but you have to have a sense of humor about yourself. I invite people into my life. That's how I do it.

I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.

I'll paint you moments of gold, I'll spin you Valentine evenings.

Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

I think [Charles] Dickens was an extrovert and Nelly [Ternan] an introvert, and I think that Nelly saw beyond the fame and adulation and she actually loved Dickens essentially for who he was. So I think he felt like she was someone he could be himself with.