Unfiltered Experience Quotes

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

I mean, if a camera's on you all the time, you don't get real moments.

I really believe there's more honesty in one live show than there may be in my whole output.

In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.

When you sit down and watch something alone, you're going to watch it for what it is.

I feel that my fans deserve to get something that's authentic and real.

Certain things can't be approximated, so I'm always interested in getting in another way, one which makes the reader bend in closer to the scene even if that scene, especially if that scene, is painful... Brutal language isn't necessarily the most truthful way of describing a brutal moment.

Don't squander beautiful moments by always trying to snap the perfect picture or record the event on film. Sometimes it's better to watch things as they happen with your own eyes, knowing that the memory of the experience will always be with you.

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

I looked at theater, in the sense that theater is unmanipulated. If I want to pay more attention to one character on stage than another, I can. I think there's not enough theater in film and not enough film in theater, in a way.

I don't ask other actors questions. I think that's too intrusive. I just watch. I don't want to be constricted to an idea of what acting is by anyone else. I want to take my own education.

My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.

There's nothing like the energy in a small comedy club room or a small theater when it's going really well. I can see everybody's face practically in the whole room. There's no cameras in the way, and it's just me.

I was spoiled by theater, where there is no editor.

I'm trying to make the readers feel as if he or she is right there in the conversation, and so I don't try to manipulate it too much.

I like to just live my life in a very real way.

My first match was on television with no buffer, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I feel like I've learned faster than a lot of other people for that reason.

It's all good fun - television and movies and so on - but the good thing in theatre is there's nothing and no one between you and the audience so you can do what you want really.

Children don't make judgments about which details are important... a child captures them all.

There's a relationship in the reality with how theater is presented - you can't experience that anywhere else. When you mess up, you mess up obviously, when you sweat, you sweat obviously, when you cry, you cry obviously. There's no hiding in theater.

I studiously avoid any academic dissections of the play and any kind of previous experience of playing. For me, it's all in the play.