Phil Klay Quotes

If I can't find a theme, I can't make a film anyone else will feel. I can't laugh at intellectual humor. I'm just corny enough to like to have a story hit me over the heart.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.

If it bothers me on the page, I don't do it. If it attracts me on the page and moves me, makes me think a bit, makes me laugh, makes me cry, I'm interested in it. If it's there on the page, it means it's there and up to me to bring it out. I have done some films along the way that have been screwed up and not as good as they read. Some films that are not that good on the page turn into good movies. So I'm fallible is what I'm saying.

I'll go and see anything so long as it amuses me, or moves me. If it doesn't do either I want to go home.

I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake.

I want people to FEEL something... If it's sadness, anger, horny, happiness whatever! As long as it doesn't just pass you by.

Well, besides being entertained, I’d like to move them emotionally. I mean I really want to uplift them. I want to look down at the audience, and this is personal experiences now I’m going to tell you. It’s like you look down at the audience and see people smiling, crying, hugging each other. I want them on their way home to feel empowered like they can do anything.

I can remember that little thrill - that little shiver of excitement - when the Opry audience would encore a person because that person had touched them so.

With "We Are The World," I can't even eat when I watch that on television. If I'm eatin' some food, I have to put it down. I feel very strongly about that.

Reading something for the first time and getting this feeling like the material provokes you on some level, and doing the movie is really just sort of defining and figuring out why exactly you felt certain things when you read it.

Papa sat with me tonight. He brought the accordion down and sat close to where Max used to sit. I often look at his fingers and face when he plays. the accordion breathes. There are lines on his cheeks. They look drawn on, and for some reason, when I see them, I want to cry. It is not for any sadness or pride. I just like the way they move and change. Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.

When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war.

I love great music and if it doesn't move me I don't listen to it.

Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?

A movie that is unable to elicit emotion isn't a movie.

She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

For a lot of people, their first love is what they'll always remember. For me it's always been the first hate, and I think that hatred, though it provides often rather junky energy, is a terrific way of getting you out of bed in the morning and keeping you going.

My paintings seem to make the strongest impression on people who are, well, who are crazy.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.

I have to stop crying when I watch "The View". It's not because of the topics at hand, I just feel sorry for that couch.

It was almost enough to make me feel emotion.