John Huston Quotes

You can sing only what you are. You can paint only what you are. You must be what your experiences, your environment, and your heredity have made you. For better or for worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.

Everything I've written has been personal and touched on things that I needed to deal with in my personal life. So I just feel that writing is great therapy, and the best writing comes from truth, and so I mine my life constantly for that.

I'm really not interested in acting as a facade, I'm interested in it as an emotional expression and as a transcendent experience for an individual. I find that a lot of people, a lot of young actors, haven't gotten to the point where they're comfortable being stripped down. They're still interested in ornate jackets.

When you play characters, you shouldn't just be putting on their characteristics - you should be finding it inside yourself.

Do stuff that is true to your own experiences.

I realized that even though I had this urge, this longing, to write about other people, in order for it to be emotionally gripping, I needed to be in there somehow.

I don't even really try to do something different. I just do what's authentic to me.

You shouldn't think about technique when you play. You have to be you. It cannot be about, 'I can play this, and I can show you that.'

Embrace what makes you unique, even if it makes others uncomfortable.

Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

I am not interested in being a role model, or in fulfilling the expectations of others. I know I am of most use to others and to myself by being this unique self: Nature, I have noticed, is not particularly devoted to copies, and human beings needn't be either.

Don't worry if people think you're good. Make this your experience. And find out what makes you unique as an artist. You don't get the opportunity to do that as much in the real world.

When you get to heaven God won't ask you why you weren't more like Billy Graham. He may ask you why you weren't more like you. Get in touch with who you are. Lead with your own unique style. Be yourself and let God use you.

Each person is born with a unique individuality, and each person has a destiny of his or her own. Imitation is crime, it is criminal. If you try to become a Buddha, you may look like Buddha, you may walk like him, you may talk like him, but you will miss. You will miss all that life was ready to deliver to you. Buddha happens only once.

Find your own technique.

I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things Ive been through are serious.

You can never be more outside of you, than what's in you

I can't tell you about acting. You can develop all the skills, voice, gesture, movement, you can develop by exercise and practice but finally fundamentally it's mining from yourself, from your own personality, from what you know. If you can't know it you can have a good guess by people you know or books you've read.

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique.

There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.

I stay true, because whatever the project is, I'm still looking for inside of that character.