Umberto Eco Quotes

I love films that make you feel something but also deliver that payload behind jokes.

The theatrical experience is also a communal one. When people saw 'Fruitvale' in the theater, there was not a dry eye at the end of the movie, and you would look to your neighbor and have this shared moment together that had a real weight behind it.

My dream was always to have an experience where an audience member would turn to another audience member, a stranger, and be like, 'What did we just go through?' And, like, kind of begin to talk.

I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.

I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. I just want (the audience) to have an experience that moves them.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.

I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

I love the way art moves people emotionally. I love the fact that when someone purchases art it is the one thing that will last for generations.

I tell the truth through music. Other people tend to catch on and agree with my truth and it turns out we are all really similar.

When we laugh we temporarily give ourselves over to the person who makes us laugh.

It all changed when I realized I'm not the only one on the planet who's scared. Everyone else is, too. I started asking people, Are you scared, too? You bet your sweet life I am. Aha, so that's the way it is for you, too. We were all in the same boat. That's probably what is so effective at our workshops. When I ask, Who else feels like this? the whole room of hands goes up. People realize they are not the only one who feels that way.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

I think it's one of the nicest privileges as an actor is to know that you can move people in one moment, make them think about their lives, or make them laugh or make them cry or make them understand something. Or just make them feel something because I think so many of us, including myself, spend too much time not feeling enough, you know?

People will not lend you a hand until you first touch their hearts.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

They call it collective energy. It's that same feeling that you get when you meditate amongst a ton of people. What actually makes the festival feel so special is that while you're watching a band or an artist, you're standing there, kind of feeling the same feeling with so many people in such a small space and that gives you collective energy. It's that kind of strange feeling in which you almost feel people breathing.

My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

I try to find something that applies not to me only, but to others, but don't try to control it too much. Essentially it is about what moves us, teaches us about ourselves.

I think music is a lifting force, I think love is the lifting force in the human condition. I think you see someone loving on their child, and it moves you, and you can't help it.

It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.

What's great about art is that if you can reach people, if they hear or see what you do and it moves them, there's a commonality.

I find that when people laugh really hard, it's usually because they're connecting and identifying in a way that they hadn't considered. That's my payoff.