Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

What I found was an emotional consistency with him. The words, the scenes, the situations - I wasn't mimicking what I thought Branch Rickey's emotional reality would have been.

'Hedwig' isn't particularly based on me, but I think that it is autobiographical in terms of emotion.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

I don't care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.

When a guitarist can evoke a certain mood through his playing, that's what's most important to me.

I sort of thought acting was just about arranging your face into emotions. I didn't realise it was about actually allowing yourself to feel the feelings, then letting your face follow. That was a big learning curve.

Once I heard how deep music could touch people and what it can make you feel and all of these emotions it could bring out, I was really fascinated with it all.

I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.

One of the key emotions a lot of people seem to be feeling is disillusionment, and what I try to do as a lyricist is touch on these emotions.

I can say that I put a lot of personal feelings into 'Hereditary', though I can also say that none of the characters in the film are surrogates for anybody in my family or for myself.

I feel like I can't write something that has a real emotion in it if I can't connect to that emotion.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

If we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe.

It's one of the things that weirdly I always used to like about my job: that expressing the emotions of a writer or someone creative and breathing empathy and life into a character people can then identify with, that they'd feel less alone.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

I've been in scenarios as an actor where you have to manufacture an emotion that's not really there, but it wasn't hard with Halle because she's a great person and very beautiful, so it ain't a tough job at the end of the day.

You look at somebody's work as an actor and you can see their emotional life being fed into it and you can kind of feel them through it.

I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.

I get an audience personally involved in a song - because I'm involved myself. It's not something I do deliberately: I can't help myself. If the song is a lament at the loss of love, I get an ache in my gut. I feel the loss myself and I cry out the loneliness, the hurt and the pain that I feel.

People think I am unemotional because my voice is flat and a bit boring. It is unfortunate but it is just the way it is. I've tried to change it but it doesn't seem to make a difference. The truth is, I have lots of emotions inside. I cried after the semi-final at Wimbledon [2012] because I was proud to reach the final and I knew how much it meant to the country. I cried after the [losing] final [to Federer], too, for different reasons. I felt I had let people down. I think people warmed to that. They could see how much it hurt.

It's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself

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

Lack of feeling in an emotional sense is responsible for the way some singers do our songs. They don't understand and are too old to grasp the feeling. Beatles are really the only people who can play Beatle music.