Wyatt Cenac Quotes

I think everybody reacts to entertainment with a different kind of visceral way, probably mostly based on their own personal experiences.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.

People always ask me, 'I don't know how you could watch that, how that affects you,' and I just tell them, 'I went through it in real life, so it's like pilots watching a 'Top Gun' movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,' something like that.

Like when I hear a beat, it might make you feel a way, but then it might make me feel a completely different way.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

It’s less as if he sees me and more as if . . . something happens to him.

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.

The sky is no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker - the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

Nonfiction narratives are really powerful and valid in themselves. But one thing that you don't get sometimes from the more clinical or academic books or nonfiction books is that you don't get to hear the person's voice; you don't get them as individuals. You get a few quotes and you hear them as sort of a case study: numbers, examples, anecdotes, maybe a paragraph here, and that's about it.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

I never try to guess what anyone else will take from a movie. Every movie is such a different experience for each and every person. I don't like it when people try telling people what they should take from a movie. You should go see it with fresh eyes and see for themselves.

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

When pieces of work speak to us in a way that feels as if they were made just for us, those become our private worlds that we return to.

I never tell anyone what to take away from a movie.

Colour is, on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with the feelings.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an aesthetic quality.