Michael Cadnum Quotes

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

I love 'I'm British But...' It's such a sweet, innocent, open-hearted film, and it has the sort of openness that I still aspire to with everything I do. It wears its heart, head, everything on its sleeve.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

Like everybody, I've had a lot of pain in my life and I'm a work in progress. You must have a true desire to see the world from a different point of view, and that comes with growing up.

For me, acting comes straight from the heart. In that sense I don't act at all. I think that to feel the character's pain I have to be myself. Somewhere audiences see that.

The truth is that I'm an idiot. I am. I don't do things by the rules sometimes. I say things that I probably shouldn't say. I push buttons. I deserve to be made fun of. And I feel like, as soon as you can make fun of something, it instantly removes the fear.

What I've found - and the older I get, the more I understand this and stand behind it - is, my whole life has been an exploration of telling the truth. It's scary to be truthful, and it's scary to reveal yourself, and I'm very attracted to doing things that scare me.

All I needed to do was sing with conviction, speaking my truth from the heart, honestly and straightforwardly, and to offer my words, ideas and music to the audience as if it were one collective friend that I'd known for a very long time.

Sometimes, it's hard holding back the truth, how you really feel, and sometimes the best way is let it out and move forward.

Those parts of myself that are too ugly or dangerous are precisely the things I feel convicted to share.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

You haven't changed. You may say: 'I'm full of love, I'm full of truth, I'm full of knowledge, I'm full of wisdom.' I say: 'That's all nonsense. Do you behave? Are you free of fear? Are you free of ambition, greed, envy and the desire to achieve success in every field? If not, you are just playing a game. You are not serious.'

In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

I think when you're 17 and you're angry, you're angry about very short-term things. And there's nothing wrong about writing that record. It's a very real record to write; it's the realest record I could write when I was 17. The problem is, when you're 28, it's not the same thing; it can be a put-on.

'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.

I wanted to show life and to see ourselves and our behaviour through an outsider's eye... from the point of view of someone who knows nothing about being a human being... He doesn't have the feelings that the rest of us do.

This is my truth, tell me yours.

I've been the type of guy, I've always been very forthcoming with how I feel. And that it doesn't make you less of a man to like go and be like, 'This is how I feel about you. This is the truth.'

Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.

The most valuable thing I can share is the importance of living in truth. Sometimes, facing those truths can actually be your worst fear.

I think you find universal truth when you get really honest with yourself and you can reach people. If you go deep enough, you have that core feeling, and that feeling can transcend the details of your experience.

Unlike grown ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.

A lot of times when I'm writing lyrics, I just think about insecurities that I might have and turn them into a scene. Some things may be true, and some things may not.

I'm emotionally in tune with my feelings and what people mean to me, and I have no trouble saying it and relating to it.

The main thing in acting is honesty, to feel the humanity and get to the essence of the character. You can't put anything into a character that you haven't got within you.