Tavis Smiley Quotes

The secret of the creative life is how to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We're all in the dirty laundry business and we're being paid to take risks and look silly. Race car drivers get paid to risk their lives in a more concrete way; we get paid to risk our lives in an emotional way.

Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.

I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work in order to give it back to the people where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And it isn't vague, it strikes against the very nerves of their life and in order to do that you have to strike against the very nerves of your own.

Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.

With each one of my films, I'm exploring one of my own issues and I try to expose myself a little in the film.

As an actor, I think sort of relish the chance to take a leap and sort of put yourself out there. You know, it's, like on any film, you just have to be willing to embarrass yourself, because otherwise you are not going to really reveal anything that you have. So I think it's exciting.

You're reluctant to give too much away when you're going to put it out there for other people. It's harder writing your truest fears and loves and guilts, because you're not sure when you're writing the right story.

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

You have to be willing to be afraid if you're going to be an artist.

I think if you're an actor you kind of have to be willing to look stupid.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

They lyrical content has grown more introspective and less abstract. I don't know if that's good or bad... Sometimes it feels a little raw to be putting so much of myself out there.

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

When I show a film at a festival, I am showing myself. Everything is at stake for me.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don't have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

The roles I think about and can't stop thinking about - on the subway, when I'm riding my bike, when I'm running - are the things I connect to.

'Romance' is based on my entire creative process. I fall in love with an idea, obsess over it, isolate myself with it, and when I eventually introduce it to my friends, they all tell me that it's stupid.

In standup, it's just you. You're your own writer, your own critic, your own director, and it's never the same. You really don't always have it down. Your continue to learn, you continue to risk, and I really love it.

Even if the film doesn't come out quite as you'd hoped, the process can also be very rewarding. I feel that way about a film called 'Lay the Favorite' that I made with Stephen Frears. I did that because the character was a real leap for me. The film doesn't quite all add up internally, but I feel very proud of what I did on it.