Jim Irsay Quotes

But I still feel like a normal person... I've walked the streets and I know what it feels like. I speak with humility, and apparently those songs connect with people.

The thing I really love about my fans is the vulnerability and openness, the crying and the hugs. They are so kind.

What I bring to the stage is humility.

I realized that there's this fine line between being personal and being general and being alienating.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

If you show you're human and have something to say, people will connect with you.

I have too much respect for people to try to control them. But they are estranged from love, afraid to reach out and touch one another. We're afraid to appear sentimental or speak in platitudes because people will say, 'What a jerk!' It takes courage in our culture to be a lover.

When you're true to yourself - not the audience that reads about me in the newspaper or sees a clip someplace, but the audience that actually comes and watches, just like Oprah - they get to know you and they sense something genuine.

As a fan, I connect with realness. Whether it's strong or vulnerable, if it's real, I can connect with it.

People love that you're human and that we're frail and we face the same situations. Honesty tends to communicate with people better than standing up there like you have an 'S' on your chest.

Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.

All I needed to do was sing with conviction, speaking my truth from the heart, honestly and straightforwardly, and to offer my words, ideas and music to the audience as if it were one collective friend that I'd known for a very long time.

I think when I show my vulnerability, people relate with that because they know deep down inside that they have vulnerable moments, and they can really connect and identify with me on those things.

To hear someone talk about their life - you get to know the way their eyes moisten up, how big the smile is or how comfortable their body language is while talking to someone.

I feel really held in being vulnerable. That's always been the kind of music that I've gravitated to as well, but to feel really supported by my audience in that is a real privilege.

When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?

Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.

I certainly wear my heart on my sleeve, and I think that comes out in the characters that I play. There's a yearning, or something, that comes out of me that people relate to.

Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other but does not create true intimacy.

Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.

Humility is really important because it keeps you fresh and new.

Humility is truth.

Intimacy, as I am using it, is sharing my reality with you.

To me, having the courage to tell your own story goes hand in hand with having the curiosity and humility to listen to others' stories.

Real men know how to listen, and real men know how to be honest.