Lewis Howes Quotes

I found that the same things I loved about performing were the things I liked about directing and creating a piece - striking a chord that was in tune with the world and was reflecting back what I saw, just from a different angle.

If you can connect with the audience emotionally, that's potent storytelling.

People don't want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination.

I'm an actor, and I want to play flawed characters, and I'm a writer that wants to write flawed characters, trying to let something out and hoping people relate through that or have fun experiencing the story.

I am not really into paintings, to be honest, but for me, the art I love is when I see singers putting their heart into their song, actors giving the performance of their lives, and books and movies that make me feel something I never thought I could; there's art in everything as long as it's made with soul.

I want listeners to feel as though they went through an experience.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

I'm interested in storytelling. I love being an artist now and connecting through art.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

I tell the songwriter's story. When I read people's lyrics, I'm so amazed. I want to tell this story and make it part of my life. I usually can't write lyrics down, but I can sure tell that story. You've got to make people feel the hurt and love in each song.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.

The arts can bring the heart to the aid of the head, the personal to the political.

A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.

I think "artistic" simply means there's more of the creator in the thing. Whether it's painting or song or movie or game, the creator puts more of themselves into the piece, so when the audience see it, they feel something real, they feel something human, they feel something that's like a person.

For me a film is at its best when you can start filling in the story with your own life experience.

I'm just always making things that are personal but hopefully also inspiring, and share not just my story, but other people's stories.

I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

Good storytelling is harder than it sounds, but the easy part is that everyone has the ability to do it. ...Tap into it.