Acting is largely about putting on masks, and music is about removing them.
Interpretation
Acting involves adopting different personas, while music reveals the true self.
In this quote, Hugh Laurie suggests that acting is a craft centered on the idea of embodying various characters and portraying emotions through masks, symbolizing deception or facade. In contrast, music serves as a medium that can strip away these facades, allowing a clearer glimpse into the genuine essence of a person, potentially expressing deeper emotions that are often hidden in everyday life.
In practice
During a discussion on the impact of art in therapy, this quote could emphasize the contrasting effects of music and acting.
L.A. runs on optimism, enthusiasm and flattery. I think you can go a little bit crazy. I've heard people say there's a limit to the number of years you can stay in this city without going slightly mad. It's just too damn sunny in every dimension - weather-wise, socially and professionally.
I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.
As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we?
To tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I know. I keep meeting people, both older and younger, who seem to have accrued so much more knowledge or expertise or certainty about who they are and the jobs they do. I just marvel at it.
I have a reverence for medicine because I hero-worshiped my father [a former doctor], and because I admire doctors, I admire study, empiricism and rational thought. I don't study, empiricize or think rationally myself - but I admire it in others.
I think good-looking people seldom make good television. And American television studios almost concede before they start: 'Well, it won't be good, but at least it'll be good-looking. We'll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things.'
In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones--when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now--perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense
You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
Though, technically, I'm shooting on location, my films are actually based inside a woman's heart. I think women are more emotional than men, and that's a thread I've explored in all my films. When I see TV these days, I'm shocked at how all the main women characters are portrayed as evil. Women are the foundation of everything, and they deserve to be treated that way on camera.
There is a sensuality about fabric. I think all materials should be inviting when they touch the skin. When I watch children stroking their mother's clothes, I feel that I have succeeded.
The first among mankind will always be those who make something imperishable out of a sheet of paper, a canvas, a piece of marble, or a few sounds
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