Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.
Interpretation
Art is about perception; it exists in your immediate environment and attitude rather than distant travels.
Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that art is not a distant treasure to be found in far-off lands but rather something that should be recognized and appreciated in our daily lives and surroundings. If one fails to see the beauty and creativity at home, the search for art in other places becomes futile.
In practice
In a speech to students about recognizing local art and talent.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
The film is made in the editing room.
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.
The beauty of doing film is that you construct whatever you do block by block and you can build something that will stay.
If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.
He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.
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