Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Nowhere probably is there more true feeling, and nowhere worse taste, than in a churchyard.

Nothing's wrong with honest emotion.

The word 'operatic' is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting. And that does a terrible disservice because 'operatic' to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere.

What I say is from my heart. You must be sincere. So when I sing a song, people are supposed to feel it.

Emotion should not be rendered by an excited trembling; it can neither be added on nor be imitated. It is the seed, the work is the flower.

Patsy Cline? Larger than life! She taught me emotion: raw, sincere, unashamed.

I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

There is a difference, of course, between real sentiment and the trash of shared experience.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

Words are easy to say, but emotions betray the best intentions.

As a writer, as a storyteller, you have to have your emotions close, and the older I've gotten, the less I've worried about not displaying emotions.

Love is bullshit. Emotion is bullshit.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything.

If you're doing your job properly, you take the risk of feeling slightly foolish and delve in and bring out the emotions.

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.

I am in no doubt that if you use the term 'luv' in a letter or text message then you are incapable of truly understanding the emotion. Artists have not pored over heartache and unrequited sentimentality for years so that our generation could decide that four letters is simply one too many to express how we feel.

Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.

If you can't do it with feeling - don't.

If you're striving for strong emotion and strong sentiment, and you're authentic with it and honest with it, then you're on the right side of the line. But if you step into sentimentality, there is a false move or a false tone to it.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist's feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression.