Martin Parr Quotes

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

I feel like I've been successful after being done with the film is when I see it, if I'm embarrassed, if I'm slightly mortified, and if I feel super-vulnerable, I think I did something.

The only question that nobody ever asks is: What breaks your heart? I think that should be asked of all "artists."... So, what breaks your heart?

Drama, it would be as if you wrote some poetry. You'd run the risk of being embarrassed if people read it, because you're pouring your heart out and you're not mitigating it with any humor or anything.

You have to be willing to be afraid if you're going to be an artist.

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise.

With music, you're really showing someone a piece of your soul. You're saying, 'This is mine. I wrote this, I made this, I'm performing this. This is how I'm presenting it to you.' There's something really scary about that, but there's also something next-worldly about it, too.

If you don't have a certain amount of stage fright, then it's not going to be that interesting. It's not going to have the inner vibration. I think screen work needs inner vibration.

In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

When you make an album, you have to decide how much you want to give away; you have to decide how much you want to open up. Because the more you open up the more rewarding it can be but the more dangerous it can be. If you really open up and it gets panned it's really painful.

I've got a long list of things I consider to be selling out. But amongst that list, one of them is when you make art without putting your guard down.

I have to be vulnerable to allow myself to give the best performance I, and that doesn't stop in between takes, and it doesn't stop when I am finished for the night.

It's always been a mantra to me, when making music or creating art, that you have to be vulnerable.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.

I can't really explain the feeling of acting. It makes you the most insecure you can possibly be.

I would say the biggest risk I always take is going in front of a live audience. There's nothing more risky to do. You have to really leave yourself open to your own authenticity, and you find that out pretty quick.

Part of acting is having the security to turn yourself loose and let yourself go in order to reach whatever depths a character has. If your guts aren't hanging out there, you don't offer anything.

This might end up in crying. If you're not prepared to cry about it, I'm not sure you're making art. And if you're not prepared to dance in anticipation, you're definitely not making art.

I think that the older I get and the more comfortable I get with myself, the more I realize that art is about relinquishing control of your emotions and being vulnerable and innocent.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.

You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.

I don't think an actor needs to necessarily go through his things to do his job. I think it's way more important to imagine. And then, when you're imagining, your experiences, your images and your own personal things will show up, but you keep imagining. You don't get stuck in your own personal things, otherwise you are telling your story in every character, and that's not interesting for anybody.