Quotes About Expression

My films are always looked at strangely, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.

I've always been excited by the strangeness of ballet, but I can't bear it when people just come forward and do a turn in the air for no reason.

Of all the parts that make up my somewhat quirky life, there are few things that raise a stranger's eyebrows faster than discovering I love country music.

For me, that's one of the best validations as an artist. To have a stranger come up to you and say that something you've created and put out there in the world has had some sort of impact on other people's lives.

I think sometimes when I sit down to write a song, it doesn't come out naturally, but when you are writing an email to someone, especially if you are writing to a stranger, you write much more spontaneously, and it's freer.

Hello, friends.' I've had fun with that expression to satisfy the cynics, but it comes from the heart, and I don't apologize for it. Like my dad - for whom I designed the expression during the 2002 PGA Championship, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease - I've never met a stranger.

Complete strangers can stand silent next to each other in an elevator and not even look each other in the eye. But at a concert, those same strangers could find themselves dancing and singing together like best friends. That's the power of music.

Being on 'Whitney' is a job, but stand-up is my life. I could never stop. There's an art to it. I love having strangers laugh with me, so as long as I can continue doing that, I'll be happy. Working on a show and collectively sharing ideas with a cast is great, but stand-up is my first love.

I am the kind of person that wants to get up in front of crowds of strangers and perform monologues. To each their own.

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it's a digital slate I'm carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

Taking your clothes off in front of strangers is something of a hobby in Germany, among both men and women, especially in the former communist East, where it was one of the few freedoms allowed.

My faith is a huge part of my life. I don't force it into my music, but it's in my experiences, so it comes through. People pick up on what they want to pick up on, but any way strangers connect to a song that I wrote is awesome.

Sometimes the last thing you want to do is to go on stage and bare your soul in front of hundreds of complete strangers. Singing the same songs night after night can remind you of things you'd rather forget.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

I don't know what DVD commentaries are about. I'd like to strangle the person who came up with that concept.

We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's our youth pastor.

I'm always in situations where you can't be funny, and yet I want to do it anyway.

On movies, you have a lot of stylists that get things too pretty. Everything gets steamed and ironed. It's just not the way we really behave.

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

Suffering is an art.

the self-understandings of cultural producers."2 They do so by drawing heavily on interviews and email conversations with some 130 participants (interviews are conducted by myself unless otherwise referenced) as well as the vibrant, sometimes urgent accounts of contemporaneous writers,

I'm actually not an exhibitionist at all. When you get onstage and you get under the lights playing music, I feel more hidden and more alone than anywhere else. You hide behind your music and let your emotions come out through the music.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.