Darin Strauss Quotes

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.

Honestly, my goal is just to let people hear my story and just like, feed everybody that could relate to my story in any way.

If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.

Sometimes if you can tell one personal story with a lot of sincerity, it can become a universal story.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

To achieve the intimacy between performer and audience in storytelling, I feel like I have to let the audience in on my emotional state, not just, "Here's a story I'm going to tell by rote, and you're just going to listen to it, because I'm such a wonderfully entertaining fellow." It's the idea of sharing enough of myself that it's not just all about, "Look at me, look at me." There's an element to it of, "You understand what I'm talking about, right? You've been in this place that I've been in," which makes it a richer experience.

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.

If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. Because that's what soul is all about.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

'Warm Bodies' ended up becoming one of the most personal relatable things I've written.

In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Experiences are like hoarded gold. Whenever I dole out a piece of my private suffering, that is when I get letters from all over the world.

You're creating an intimacy that everybody feels, that it's their experience, not yours. I'll never introduce a song and say, now this song is about 'my' broken heart.

Whenever I perform, people get me because I'm talking about things that people can identify with and relate to. I'm not just up there doing jokey, jokey, joke.

Everybody goes through a lot of the same things, and I talk about those, and that's the key. You have to connect with your audience, and I might take them on a trip with me, tell them I went here and I went there and they'll go with me, you know, to hear the stories.

You want people - I want people to relate to me as a character. I want them to go, 'That could have been me,' or, 'I know someone like that.'

I've come to recognize what I call my 'inside interests.' Telling stories. And helping people tell their stories is a sort of interpersonal gardening. My work at NBC News was to report the news, but in hindsight, I often tried to look for some insight to share that might spark a moment of recognition in a viewer.

Everything is an open book. I don't speak on other people's hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I'm going to talk about it. That's what my fan base appreciates the most. I'm universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

If you have tapped into something that is real for you, chances are you are going to tap into something that is real for someone else.

A lot of the albums that I've been really into are like, 'Oh man. That doesn't make him look like a perfect human. That actually shows his warts and his scars, and for some reason, I'm super drawn to him now because he shared that or she shared that with me.'

I figure I'm just one of many people. I'm not that different from anybody else, and I don't have great language, highfalutin' language - I'm very ordinary. So I figure if I write about myself, other people with similar feelings and experiences would go, 'Oh, that's me.'