Art is a wound turned into light.
I was really aware, even while it was happening, that the discovery of arts education in my life sort of saved my life.
I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.
I thought 'Chelsea Girls' was going to change my life.
I think I'm an ambitious artist but you have to understand the measure of your influence on people. You're not going to change people's lives with your art. What you do is you give them a little pat so that you change the course of the direction that they're going.
I had been a real problem child, but once I got into acting, my parents never had any more trouble with me because all of that energy was directed in a positive way.
Art has the ability to redeem life by finding beauty even in the worst aspect of things.
'Rent' opened up my heart, my senses. I was never the same. I hadn't been back in that place in the same way since. 'Hamilton' put me back in that place.
A woman came up to me after one of the screenings with tears pouring down her face and sobbed, You've defined my entire life for me on the screen.
But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.
A community united by the ideals of compassion and creativity has incredible power. Art of all kinds---music, literature, traditional arts, visual arts---can lift a community.
Just having the camera, being able to pull back from situations and be an observer, it saved my life... I realised I could find these intimate moments and that people trusted me. That, basically, my camera was magic.
If you are ever on stage, and it feels as though the audience is not laughing at the right points or are not quite as engaged as you'd hope, you have to remember there is always somebody who might be falling in love with this world and having an epiphany. I was that person.
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
When one individual writer sings her song of beauty, she changes the lives of a million others.
