Jon Richardson Quotes

In order to work and to become an artist one needs love. At least, one who wants sentiment in his work must in the first place feel it himself, and live with his heart

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

Why can't people just say they were moved? Why do they have to say it's sappy?

High culture is paranoid about sentiment. But human beings are intensely sentimental.

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but not when someone's saying "I love you.

I have always felt sorry for people afraid of feeling, of sentimentality, who are unable to weep with their whole heart. Because those who do not know how to weep do not know how to laugh either.

I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.

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 such a joy to be able to play someone who is angry. It's a joy and a relief. Having to be nice all the time is exhausting and boring.

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.

Sometimes I think as an artist you tend to go toward the heartbreak and the sadness because those are the deepest and heaviest emotions you can pull out as an entertainer and as a singer.

The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live. Be a man before being an artist!

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

Ward has no heart, they say, but I deny it: He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it.

How can you write if you can't cry?

We changed it to emocionó, the way you say in Spanish, "to emotion me" [to be moved]. That, as opposed to "haunt." We wanted the feeling of sadness and grief and obsession, so we used emocionó.

Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.

It was all the things I wanted my music to be, but yet it wasn't grand and it wasn't obtuse - it wasn't overshooting, it wasn't undershooting, it was precise. The lyrics and the way that I was able to extract and excavate emotion within me.

The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.

As actors, emotion is the sand in the sandbox for us. Without emotion, there's nothing to play - and we are playing. We know that. Whether you think we do or not, we know that.

And I could write it better than you ever felt it.

I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate these basic human emotions.

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.