Andrew Stanton Quotes

That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter. Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

Drama and comedy, to me, are all about being surprising, coherent, and true, all at once.

No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.

I don't write anything that I haven't lived. In terms of integrity, you have to write what you live. And if you write beyond what you live, it is theory. And theory is not helpful. It is just not.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

When Billie Holiday sings a song, I hear the song, but I always hear her and her truth.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.

I think "artistic" simply means there's more of the creator in the thing. Whether it's painting or song or movie or game, the creator puts more of themselves into the piece, so when the audience see it, they feel something real, they feel something human, they feel something that's like a person.

Those are facts. Are they the truth? No, for they do not tell you of the heart, and that is where truth lives.

You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

Words are the instruments you play to the song of your ideas, you're just playing covers.

You can't teach anyone. You can't tell anyone. That's the thing you have to sit down and experience in order for it to mean anything. You can't intellectualize it. It's like why movies are cool. It's a combination of pictures and design and acting and music can create an experience that is outside of the experience that you can actually have in reality, which gets to my motion picture philosophy. People are like, 'aren't you trying to make the movies as real as you can?'

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.