Damien Chazelle Quotes

I love the power of the musician who composes and performs. I envy their ability to put a nugget of truth in three minutes of sweat and emotional outpouring, colored entirely from their thoughts.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

What novels do that biographies don't is get at truths by penetrating the facts, by going deeper to what's underneath fact, through invention.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.

I think artists are going to express things from an emotional point of view, that's their job, to suggest and interpret, and report what they witness. That's their job as artists, you're looking for the rub, where's the rub, you're a storyteller, you're looking for the rub, not necessarily the solutions, or you're not necessarily educated, you're not the winner of a debate contest, a national debate contest, you're not necessarily a person who has a doctorate in anything.

Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

As an actor, you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

You can sometimes get your own feelings across more strongly if you pretend that you're singing it from someone else's angle. But it's always from me. It's just a new way of framing it.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

There are women to whom nature has granted the gift of silent emotion. They have mobile faces, changeful eyes, soft lips, which express joy or desolation naturally, and with the charm of perfect simplicity and truth.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

This is a cliche, but in fiction, I feel it is easier for me to get to some sort of truth, some kind of more honest writing.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.