Mario Gabelli Quotes

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

The one thing people like about my show is it's universal. Everybody can relate to it. I think people enjoy going to a show and saying, 'Something like that happened to me.'

I write for myself; I'm trying to keep myself interested in the music. But at the same time, I want to make the songs relatable in a way; I want to keep melodies pretty simple and the lyrics open-ended so that people could maybe relate them to their own life in different ways. Something for everybody to have a piece of.

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.

That's what's amazing about songwriting: you can write a story that everyone connects to.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

If you try to create something that everybody can relate to, you're gonna make something that nobody can relate to.

Because the beauty of songs, I think, is if you do it right a lot of people can relate to it in their own way and make their own meaning out of things.

People often reach out and comment on how they relate to my lyrics, which makes me feel very warm inside.

How could Hillary clinton not come off as human! I mean, even Nurse Ratched was human. I don't think people are interested in 30 years of the past, and I don't get this notion of change-maker.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.

And I think right now I'm just enjoying finding something such as One Weekend a Month where I can really resonate with this woman's history and her situation.

I think everybody wants to connect. There is nothing worse than feeling disconnected. And stories that really move people and make people care are the ones where they feel some sort of connection.

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.

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

I think there's just a lot of compassion in art. Again, when you're doing something that resonates with somebody else, you're going through an experience another person has had, whether it's been a painful experience or a joyous experience or a happy experience.

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be too deep about it, but when we play shows, music takes everybody on their own journey - because one song might mean something to me, that means something completely different to someone else.

People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I'm Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.

I get really affected by songs as a music listener - they mean so much and they feel so significant.

I'm often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don't think I've actually cried watching myself.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

The Catcher in the Rye had such a deep impact on me, because it felt like it was just Holden and me. I didn't feel like any other person had read that book. It felt like my secret. Writing that I identify with feels like it's just me and the writer. So I hope that whoever is reading what I do feels like that.

You just never know if people out there will relate to things when you write them; it matters to you, and to some people it doesn't. Some people are 'I'm not in the mood for that; thanks.'

One of the great things about drama is that it makes you feel like you're not a crackpot, and that there are other people who think and feel the way you do.