Robertson Davies Quotes

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

Nobody sees the same movie. I'm sure there are people who saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and thought "Finally a gay movie about men who really care about each other. Thank God!" That's not what I saw necessarily but I don't think any two people see the same movie.

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.

What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance. It is character which builds an existence out of circumstance. From the same materials one man builds palaces, another hovels; one warehouses, another villas; bricks and mortar are mortar and bricks until the architect can make them something else.

Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

If I sing "you broke my heart, you left me flat," everyone knows exactly what that means - they know the story. But if I sing a line that's plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It's open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle.

The good thing about movies is that they're subjective. You can connect to different themes depending on your own perspective.

What men have thought about life in the past is less important than what you feel about it to-day.

I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.

I believe you can only draw from your own life as an actor. All the characters I've played, I only have my infinite eye and the presence of my life to take from.

You can have a poem like "B-Movie" and sum up thirty conversations that people have had on the subject, but I wrote it down, and other people didn't.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

It is the heart that makes the critic, not the nose.

Whether we like to admit it or not, as artists, we do project our own worldview on to what we do.

It is man that makes truth great, and not truth that makes man great.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

It’s almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.