Paul Provenza Quotes

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' / The man replied, 'Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'

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 don't understand the actor that chooses to play the same role in everything all the time.

I really enjoy talking to actors or filmmakers that enjoy that process of creating and how they go about doing it.

A lot of people play to impress, but the really gifted ones play to move. That's the greatest point of ever doing this.

The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.

I have seen no men in life loving their profession so much as painters, except, perhaps, actors, who, when not engaged themselves, always go to the play.

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

What makes a great dancer is not technique. What makes a great dancer is passion.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious. And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

I don't see why people want new plays all the time. What would happen to concerts if people wanted new music all the time?

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

If you want to please the critics, don't play too loud, too soft, too fast, too slow.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.

One of the beauties about being an actor is that nothing really has to make sense. You just do it and live it and hope it comes out and try to find the truth in what's in the text in your own way and hopefully you can find truth in the text and everything else just comes.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

In other things the knowing artist may Judge better than the people; but a play, (Made for delight, and for no other use) If you approve it not, has no excuse.

I am a man and alive. For this reason I am a novelist. And, being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, te scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog....Only in the novel are all things given full play.

Performance and music are inexorably tied together. And hell, I'll watch Brittany's Toxic music video all day. But there's a difference between that and listening to Leo Kottke play guitar. One is entertainment. The other is Music.

The reason I'm an actor is because I'll never be able to be perfect.