Janet Fitch Quotes

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in.

My father was a world-class scientist and my mother was a prolific painter. I could see that my parents had completely different ways of knowing and understanding the world, and relating to it. My father approached things through scientific inquiry and exploration, while my mother experienced things through her emotions and senses.

Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like.

I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.

I like to be able to understand the feeling of the director, that a film corresponds to something in his life. Otherwise, it doesn't interest me much.

The songs are about things that we were thinking and we wrote 'em down, and when you listen to 'em, whatever you think it's about... THAT'S what it's about!

No two persons ever read the same book.

I'm somebody who has to physically experience an environment in order to know it as well as I would like to know it. I recognize this is impressionistic, not scientific. People say, 'You sound like Walt Whitman.' Well, I'll take that comparison.

Generally, if I read something that I think is really good and that I feel a connection with and is right for me, I see and hear who the guy is, as manifested by me.

I don't think that anyone can really understand anything until it's understood on a cellular, emotional level.

I love the intimacy of TV. I love the fact that you don't necessarily have the pressure of an audience or anyone around watching it - just you and it.

I prefer to read into other people's songs what I want to hear in them.

I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.

Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.

The good thing about movies is that they're subjective. You can connect to different themes depending on your own perspective.

I relate to those characters - and any character I play - in as much as I put myself in their positions and feel how I would personally deal with their experiences.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy.