David Whyte Quotes

I believe acting to be my own journey through connection more than anything else, but that's only my take on it.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.

The mirror is a powerful tool because it forces you to deal with yourself on a deeper level. Conceptually, paintings are like mirrors. They're an expression from the artist: 'This is how I view the world - I'm presenting it to you.'

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel. I feel that it is healthier to look out at the world through a window than through a mirror. Otherwise, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

Performance is a vehicle for entering different worlds of experiencing.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Paintings are memories. Memories of the painter who painted them. Memories that can be shared as well. Paintings are things to remember things by.

An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.

I deal in a very artistic way of what interests me and marks my passion, and I try to - whether its good or not - am in love with acting and the stage and characters and the ability to reach and to touch people, so that's where, I guess, that's where my heart will reside, by and large.

When you're acting you put so much of yourself into working. As much fun as it is, it's still hard work and it's still a challenge.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

Music is like painting in sound. You take it into your inner heart and never lose it. It's eternally mysterious.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.

As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.

That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.

When you do these things, you sort of take the journey. The journey is all about how I can interweave the Oscar Wilde story, the story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I'm struggling with - my own celebrity, my own life. This is semi-autobiographical in terms of my commitment to this kind of thing.

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.