Dominic Monaghan Quotes

You can practice to learn a technique, but I'm more interested in conceiving of something in the moment.

That's what sets apart one actor from another, and that you can't teach. You can't give someone that. When you're working, putting a character together, or in a scene, that's where things will happen that you have to have the intuition to notice them, and to register them.

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

Acting isn't something that I think about very consciously, somehow that just doesn't work for me. I just kind of feel my way into it.

For as long as I've been making movies, I really don't know a lot of the technical side. I mean, I've actively and consciously tried to avoid learning that stuff. I just want to be open and receptive to what's happening in the moment, and I don't want to force anything.

Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing guitar, or a particular chord sequence, or blowing a horn, it's based on improvisation and spontaneity.

When I was small I didn't really know what i was doing. I just sang and it came out sounding pretty good. I just do it and it happens.

I always want my mouth to be like two steps ahead of my brain and I want my hands to move without thinking. I want to be able to dive into my computer or use my controllers without having to be, like, "Hmm, what would be a good choice here?" You just want music to happen like the same way the sweat's rolling off my face.

When it's time to make music, that's about getting lost for me. To be a control freak is not half as good as being a freak who's casually in control. You're feeling around in the dark for something that feels good.

Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.

Most songs I write are spur-of-the-moment-type things. I have to be spontaneous. If not, songwriting can bore me. There is no pre-design or idea of what I am going to do when I go into the studio. It's all like that for me. I could go in and write two or three songs in an eight-hour session. You can't over-think songs. You just can't.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

If I'm in the middle of a take and I start to think about what I'm doing, I just mess up and I have to stop and so I find that for me, you really need to trust your instinct.

When I rehearse, it ends up doing more harm than good. I think I work a little bit better when it's right off the bat. Mostly, I try to wrap my head around a role as much as I can without rehearsing and then kind of make it as fresh as possible on the day.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

There's actually something interesting about having no rehearsal time - you have to just walk in and go with your gut, which is exciting.

Ever since I was really really little, I was just singing all the time. Like one of my favorite games when I was little would be to just have one of my sisters pick a title, and I would impromptu create that song.

As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.

Acting is in your soul.

I don't know, my music has always just come from where the wind blew me. Like where I'm at during a particular moment in time.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.