Marcel Proust Quotes

The good thing about being an actor, and the gift of being an actor, is that you are beautifully forced to see the world with different eyes.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

The artists must see all things as if he were seeing them for the first time. All his life he must see as he did when he was a child.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

I am not interested in shooting new things - I am interested to see things new.

The gift art gives us is that instead of seeing only our own world, we see into other times, which offers a window into other cultures and sensibilities.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.

That's the power of film. If it's good, it can somehow make you feel connected to even the farthest thing from your own experience.

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.

It's very strange: if you're a philosopher or musician or an artist, people automatically believe you can see the future. Even if they don't like you, they accept your vision as an individual.

The artist must ask you to think of the world in a different way, and sometimes it's a more abstract way; sometimes it's a completely different kind of colouring.

'Singing Saw' was exactly seeing through my eyes; 'City Music' let me write from somebody else's perspective, somebody living in New York.

Artists, in theory, should not be limited to their personal experience, culture, identity, and worldview. But they must also accept that the degree of difficulty in imagining beyond their own borders is steep, and the failure rate is high.

Man, I live out 90 percent of my songs and the other 10 percent... once in a while, I'll put myself in someone else's shoes and try to go down that road.

Artists are visionaries. We routinely practice a form of faith, seeing clearly and moving toward a creative goal that shimmers in the distance - often visible to us, but invisible to those around us.

That is the responsibility of the artist, of the actor, to inhabit these roles and put on somebody else's shoes. It's the responsibility and the gift of what it is I get the opportunity to do.

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.

What I love in art is that it takes known combinations and reorders them in a way that sheds light on something that they have never seen before or allows to consider the world in a slightly different way.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.