Rufus Wainwright Quotes

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

When I play the trumpet, I'm in a different character.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

Theatre is the safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.

It's fun to play characters in songs. I can just cheat a little bit... be this person for just a small amount of time and just help vent that idea.

I think the great thing about theatre, and if you start in theatre, is that it does build a confidence in poetic themes and ideas.

Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gaugin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering - it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared.

I'm the most mellow person offstage. I think it's just, going onstage lets me get out some frustration that I'm too shy to do in real life. Instead of doing it in private, I'd rather do it in front of 1,000 people who've paid $25 to see me lose my mind.

You can read a Shakespeare play, but does that mean you wouldn't want to see it on the stage?

The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to.

Singing, it's like it's like loving somebody, it's a supreme emotional and physical experience.

I've never sung a single song in my whole life on purpose to shock anyone. My 'hot numbers' are all, if you will notice, written about something that is real in the lives of millions of people.

I still perform because it's a necessity for my innards. And those songs, some of those songs, I have sung, I don't know how many thousands of times. And I promise you, every single solitary night, they're new to me. They are brand-new to me that night.

The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess'd them

As soon as I leave the world [of the show], I want to turn around and come back. That's how real it is. As soon as I leave the theater I want to wake up and come back the next day and do it all over again. It's that much fun.

Music is real; it's something you can touch and feel. It moves you - the bass literally shakes you and rocks you from the inside. Music makes your soul feel amazing while you're performing it. It's not air, it's not wind, it's not anything like that. It's solid. It's thick. It's like summertime in New York.

I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion.

You get to have some bigger comedic moments with some very real dramatic stuff. All that in one makes for a fulfilling artistic job.

What I like about being a musician is that I find the thing soothing, but I also give the soothing to other people.

It's fun to explore areas that are taboo that you're not allowed to in real life as an actor.

I don't look at myself on the outside. Sometimes you feel like you're not really there and need one more [take], because I feel like something is coming out. I don't really know what but I need to get it out.

That's the crazy part about music, that you can just be someone and it means something.

I don't agree with this romantic fantasy that people who suffer from depression are more likely to be artists. I find that I am more creative when I am happy actually.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.