John Wilmot Quotes

One of the most incredible and important things about the theater is that we're creating a safe space for all feelings, but especially, ugly feelings.

If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

As an artist myself, I know what it's like to put your heart and soul into something. You can feel the presence of another person.

I want to be able to make people laugh and cry and feel happy or sad and feel all these different emotions through singing and acting. Hopefully throughout my career, I'll get to pursue them.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought.

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.

My work is immaterial. It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's emotions. I'm giving you something to experience yourself.

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.

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

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.

For me, singing was real life, not two plus two equals four.

Our jobs as artists is to make sure our art tells a real story and let people see themselves in these characters. It's about having a conversation about being better people.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

I suppose that it doesn't matter whether a song is written or sung by a man or a woman. If the sentiment is there, it captures the audience.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

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

Your movie should lull people into a place of openness and vulnerability. If it is just a diatribe, it's never going to work.

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.

Your friends are really an extension of your vision of the world. It's kind of a physical manifestation of how you feel. Like your soul.

One does not go to the theater to escape from himself, but to reestablish contact with the mystery that we all are.

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.