Austin Butler Quotes

The thing that I enjoy about being an actor and the thing that I enjoy about the arts in general is the ability to make the audience feel an emotion that they weren't intending to feel before they went in.

I'm the type of artist who touches people, that's the type of artist that I am.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist."

Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.

I thought for a long time that within art, that you would come up with an idea, you would labor over it intensely until you felt like it was done, and then when you finished it, that was the final stage. I started to realize that that's not actually the completion of it. The final stage of any kind of art is to really lose control over it and let it affect other people. You can't control the effect that it has on people, but you hope that it has some sort of reaction. You just hope that they're not indifferent to it, you wanna make people feel something, whether it's love or hate.

As long as I can make an audience feel something, I don't care whether it's a good thing or bad thing, just to feel something is important to me.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion.

To me, art's highest purpose is to entertain, to enlighten, to inspire, to evoke emotion and to change an audience in some way, big or small.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

You know what makes me teary? Goya. Goya makes me cry.

I am very conscious of the viewer because that's where the art takes place. My work really strives to put the viewer in a certain kind of emotional state.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

The first movie I ever cried at was when I was 10 years old and saw 'The Notebook' in theaters. I was like, 'Whoa, so weird. Crying at a movie? I'm not supposed to do that. So weird.' I didn't know that art could make you do that.

I went to see 'The Piano' with Holly Hunter when I was in a Paula Vogel play, and I was just gone. I couldn't focus at all. It took that creative part of my brain with it so absolutely.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

People have cried at a couple of shows. To think that someone could do that for me... Jesus Christ. That's a crazy sign.