Daniel Levitin Quotes

Music is a social act.

I think one of the things that makes theater special is first of all, it's one of the last places you put your phone away. And second of all, it's one of the last places where we all have a common experience together.

I think theater is a core need of a community.

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

I have to feel the audience. I enjoy that feeling of community. There's something sort of spiritual about it in a lot of ways. It's like we're all doing this together.

I just think that the collective experience of going to see a film is something you can't recreate.

I think that theater is a unique way to communicate with people as they gather together with other people they may not even know. It creates a sense of shared community for the time of the performance that hopefully carries over into other aspects of the audience's life because they have shared this experience together.

It is such a social thing, laughing. Two thousand people in a room laughing is such a great buzz and they tend to laugh much more in a group.

There has to be a continuation of the communal experience of filmgoing.

A live show is one of the last holdouts of a thing that makes you feel a part of a community, where you'll go and maybe meet your future wife or boyfriend, or you're taking your sister to her first show. These are the things that you remember later in your life.

Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don't think the desire for that magic will ever go away.

Theatrically seeing a movie with a group of people and having a collective experience has an authenticity that you can't get with your big screen television.

Movies are such an integral part of American culture. We're so spread out in this country, and movies offer us a chance to come together and have a communal experience.

Collaboration has become really integral to my process. I play music so that I can spend time with my friends and communicate in that way. I experience so much joy in that process, because, you know, it's those times of getting together and playing music and all that comes with it that are the best for me.

Pantomime is a big thing in the cultural calendar of my country, you know. So subtlety's not my forte.

So I would dance and she would sing, and it was kind of a family thing. Performing was part of our world.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players.

One of the things that's important about family is the narrative history they create for themselves.

Part of what I love about games is that, even if you're best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there's nobody holding a gun to your head.

I think theater and church are so relatable because it's traditional call-and-response in the way that an audience interacts with the actors.

You feel like you're really a part of a movement when you're singing Journey at a karaoke bar.

You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experience and building community and catalyzing dialogue and bringing people together.

The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.