Sarah Paulson Quotes

Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting.

How much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.

You do run and scream and cry and work yourself up into hysterics, and then you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, and you feel really off and really strange. And that's because rationally, even though you know everything is OK, you have put yourself through this traumatizing experience, and your body is still going.

Fight, flight, and screw up royaly.

You have a visceral, physical response to being in [the real] places, and the sights and sounds and the smells just bring something else out in you. You're not having to fake that or imagine that. It's there. It becomes as much an act of something you bounce off as the other people you're working with.

If you're trying to make someone happy, you gotta try and make them happy. If you're trying to have a normal conversation, you've got to have a normal conversation. If you're trying to make them sad, you've got to make them sad. I think that's how you get real performances out of people.

The first time we did cavalry charge I was so breathless with excitement I nearly fell off the horse. I actually saw stars in front of my eyes and thought I was going to faint. The second time I had a bit more control but was still giddy with excitement. And the third time I was an emotional wreck. I had to really try hard not to cry.

Then I realize what it is. It's him. Something about him makes me feel like I am about to fall. Or turn to liquid. Or burst into flames.

It's a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real.

An emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.

People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like you're watching television -- you don't feel anything.

Music bypasses the intellect, it makes you laugh, makes you cry, makes you want to dance, makes you want to have sex.

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.

What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon.

Why is a picture of something real eventually more exciting than the thing itself?

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body.

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

Filming is physically and emotionally hard, especially acting in something like this, where we go into the honest feelings of these people. But it's also very exciting because there's an adrenaline that's pumping (through you) when you're doing these scenes.

It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It's not an intellectual process.