Norman Mailer Quotes

I don't want to hear songs about how sunshiny things are. I don't like songs that feel like radio candy... I like the ones that make you think, laugh or cry - they pull some kind of emotion out of you.

If the film is not emotional, then it operates on a superficial level.

I like any song that can tell a story that people can relate to.

People want something that's relevant to their lives. They want something that means something to them, and they want something where it seems like people have thought about what they're saying.

My primary goal is always to tell a story that will resonate with people on a deeply emotional level.

I write songs that mean something to me because I want to connect with people and make them feel something too.

And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

It’s a brilliant song! C’mon…’Every day is like survival. You’re my lover, not my rival.’ What could be more meaningful than that? (Jesse)

It might sound goofy, but I do believe that emotions have power. We're all driven by something, and most of that is emotional reaction.

Sometimes when you meet someone, there’s a click. I don’t believe in love at first sight but I believe in that click. Recognition.

I know a tree feels it when the wind blows through it. It probably goes, 'Chhhhhh, this is wonderful.' And that's how I feel when I'm singing some songs. It's wonderful.

Everything we do is about the emotion of the characters. We believe the better the emotion, the better the movie.

There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emotion while watching that film. I believe that it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place.

We think we understand a song's lyrics but what makes us believe in them, or not, is the music

He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine- I am sure he is- I feel akin to him- I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.

I believe that much of the secret of soul-winning lies in having bowels of compassion, in having spirits that can be touched with the feeling of human infirmities.

There are tears. There's laughter. There's an unconscious thing happening between us as humans. There's so much about the brain that we don't understand. I believe everybody's empathic.

I think most actors rarely get the opportunity to play something really close to you and speaks to something you deeply believe.

I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident [...] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity.

I believe honesty comes across in music because for [most] people music isn't just something to dance to.

What makes us feel drawn to music is that our whole being is music: our mind and body, the nature in which we live, the nature which has made us, all that is beneath and around us, it is all music.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I believe that everybody needs to tell their story - to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We all want that, deep down inside - and writing a book is a great way to make sense of your own experience and to share it with others.

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

When somebody is talking to you about something terrible on set with lines, and you believe what he says, sometimes it gives a strange vibe, because you wonder when that person is talking if he's talking about something that really happened to him and he's using the character.