Jack Gilbert Quotes

A lot of us are too busy focusing on what we think people want to hear, as opposed to just saying what's in our hearts.

In general, my rule is find out where your heart is, then speak from the heart. People know the difference between that and something scripted.

I approach everything the same. I try to make it as real as possible, whether you gotta make people laugh or make people cry, it's always the same approach for me. But if I start doing pratfalls, somebody please pull the plug on me.

A heart-felt prayer is not recitation with the lips. It is a yearning from within which expresses itself in every word, every act, nay every thought of people.

I think that the best way you can get honesty across in your music to connect and relate to people is to be motivated by personal emotions, stories and feelings.

Regardless of how funny I want to be, I don't ever have a problem speaking from my heart or speaking honestly to people.

I still think people like to hear from someone's heart and how they really feel than the old political rhetoric trying to not say the wrong thing because how would it look, would they get votes, lose votes.

Tis not my talent to conceal my thoughts, Or carry smiles and sunshine in my face, When discontent sits heavy at my heart.

So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word 'love' to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

I don't hide my emotions from people. I am not a focus-group tested, blow-dried candidate or governor.

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.

As a writer, as a storyteller, you have to have your emotions close, and the older I've gotten, the less I've worried about not displaying emotions.

I'm not writing just classic-sounding songs, but songs that come from experience.

The more you do speak from the heart, rather than thumping the agenda, people will listen or relate or open themselves up more.

There's not much that I'm closed off about, and the universe gave me all that so I could help people feel like they don't have to be something they're not or feel like they have to fake happy. There's nothing worse than being fake happy.

It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

If you work from memory, you are most likely to put in your real feeling.

I do not correct my first imaginings by my second--well, yes, perhaps a word or so, but only to vary, not to delete. I want to represent the course of my humors and I want people to see each part at its birth.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

Being comedic is a skill, because there is a fine line where the context is important. And being dramatic is just being honest and real in that moment.

Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

American theatre, to me, represents zeroing down on what the need is to get inside the personal hearts of people. I think it's really beautiful if we can keep doing that instead of just fluffing everything up and hiding again.

I have never written a word that did not come from my heart. I never shall.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.