Benjamin Clementine Quotes

That's one of the good things about music. You get to do it live, where you can touch the people and interact with them.

Again, I'm used to speaking to a lot of people; I have a lot of friends and family, and I perform music and speak in front of a lot of crowds. So I share with people already a lot in my life.

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I 'do things in front of people.' I don't know why I do what I do. I've tried working behind the scenes. I felt left out!

Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.

Acting and singing are actually very similar because they're both telling a story.

It is one of the most validating things for an artist like me, to have people sing along to your songs.

People love to see reactions, they love to see emotions that come about.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

It's a great feeling to think that I can be a friend to so many people through my movies.

You know, it's recently come into focus for me why I want to be an actor: It's because of the connection I feel to people.

I love intimacy, always, of performing.

I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

It used to be that we felt that when we went to a theater, a legitimate theater... that we were going to share an experience together. That when we walked away where there would be something to talk about in that movie that had some meaning and relevance in our lives. And I think that we have lost that.

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.

Acting is way of making yourself exist.

When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.

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.

After I perform 'My Girlfriend's Boyfriend,' it takes a lot out of me emotionally; and, at the end of it, I feel like I know the audience and the audience knows me. It's this weird unspoken bond that we'll kind of always have with each other.

When I was a teenager I loved acting, but I really just loved it for myself. I didn't like the fact that anyone else saw the work I was doing. When I moved to New York, I started to realize that I wanted people to see the stuff that I was doing, and I wanted it to mean something to them.

In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people.

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

Singing is my passion, my first love and the secret of my energy. Music to me is like finding my inner self, my soul. It gives me a great joy to see audiences enjoying with me. I have given my heart to singing. When I sing, I can feel romance in everything around me.

I'm very interested in the way people interact emotionally.

As a filmmaker and an actor, my job is to react towards people, but I want a reaction from them.

I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.