Emily Watson Quotes

From the stage, I can reach a large audience, and you learn from being on stage how much a song reaches, what extent of the crowd a song can reach. I write in a way that can reach most of the audience, but I also wanted to have truly intimate moments as well, many intimate moments, more so than the big moments.

I know that if I can't move people, then I have no business being an actor.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I'm telling the story to.

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.

If the beat gets to the audience, and the message touches them, you've got a hit.

I just try to tell a story with a song, and be able to try to transmit the emotion to you. That's all I'm really trying to do.

I like to see people's eyes when I'm singing to them.

All I really want to do is entertain people out there sitting in the dark and for them to believe it.

Let me put it this way: If you're sitting in a movie and you're watching me, and you say, 'Isn't that Michael Caine a wonderful actor?' then I've failed.

When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.

As an actor, what you really want to do is communicate with people - this is my aim, my principle aim.

And when I play they know I exist, and it leaves a space when I go.

When I'm singing I feel like I'm talking to someone. I'm in conversation when I perform - either with myself or with whomever is listening.

It's sort of a feeling of power onstage. It's really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don't really think it's power... it's the goodness.

I've always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, 'Hi,' that the people ought to get their money's worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

At the end of the day, whether it's on film or on stage or for a crowd of however many at Kenwood House, my job is to make sure people have a good time and come away with a feeling and a story.

How many millions of times have I sung 'Love Changes Everything?' But when I see how it matters to people, it gives me the impetus to rediscover it and remember how lucky I am to have a song like that.

Actors are the most important. Performance is what matters. Nothing matters more than the actors; they have to perform. No one else can give life to the characters. Audiences must believe the characters as real and the moments as real.

Songs I do have to strike an emotional chord the first time I sing them.

When we're filming, I sometimes look into the camera and wonder who's out there, who will be watching.

I believe acting and teaching are not so far apart. As a teacher, you educate. And films educate, too, but they do it in a massive way.

Most people are at a concert because they want to be inspired, entertained, moved; we musicians have the mission to be bringers of joy, of ecstasy.

My passion is capturing what it feels like to love, be it romantic or otherwise. I love to watch two people realize what they meant for each other - and that goes across all media, books, TV, movies, personal essays; everything.

I always wanted to act. To be with my friends. To share something with the audience about the human condition.