An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so he must be willing to accept all experiences that life can offer.
If you want something from an audience, you give blood to their fantasies. It's the ultimate hustle.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding and engaging with the desires of an audience to succeed in creative endeavors.
Marlon Brando's quote highlights the idea that artists and performers must tap into the dreams and fantasies of their audiences to capture their attention and achieve success. By 'giving blood' to these fantasies, one is investing emotional and creative energy, which is essential for making a meaningful connection and ensuring that one's work resonates deeply with others. This reflects the hustle often required in the arts, where understanding and catering to audience desires can lead to greater recognition and impact.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about creative expression, one might say, 'As Marlon Brando said, by giving blood to the audience's fantasies, we truly engage them.'
More from Marlon Brando
All quotes →A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they're so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs.Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I've been pretty messed up, a mess pretty much.
I don't stretch my hand out anymore, but I never get tired of waiting for the next magic.
I put on an act sometimes, and people think I’m insensitive. Really, it’s like a kind of armor because I’m too sensitive. If there are two hundred people in a room and one of them doesn’t like me, I’ve got to get out.
Tell me, do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.
Too much success can ruin you as surely as too much failure.
Similar quotes
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
My music is evidence of my soul's will to live.
The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
Give me artificial flowers - porcelain and metal glories - neither fading nor decaying, forms unaging. Flowers of the splendid gardens of another place, where Forms and Styles and Knowledge dwell. I love flowers made of glass or gold, true Art's true gifts, their painted hues more beautiful than nature's, worked in nacre and enamel, with perfect leaves and branches.
He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.