Ben Brantley Quotes

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words.

I value above all the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically, without answers. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful.

I don't want people to look back at my matches and say, 'When you did that move, it was good, and I liked it because it was cool.' I want people to sort of remember a rush of images and the emotion that they felt when they saw it. That's when I think you have a real masterpiece in your hands.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Artists are overcompensating with this aggressive, energetic, hyperstimulating music - it's like someone shaking you. But it can't move people on an emotional level.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

If you make a record, you should ask yourself, 'Did it make someone cry, in a good way, not a bad way?' There should almost be subjective emotional criteria for evaluating work, instead of just profitability.

A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art.

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

There's a romance and power to live theater.

All art is about appealing to emotion.

I love the power of theater. I think it's an experience you never forget.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'