Sometimes, when the material is really good, you put expectations on yourself to make it the best possible show. You're not just serving up the regular hash and doing your job and going home.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of high standards in artistic expression and the pressure that comes with it.
Peter Dinklage discusses the burden of expectations that artists face when they encounter exceptional material. Rather than treating their work as just a routine job, they feel compelled to elevate their performance, striving to deliver something extraordinary.
In practice
In a speech at an art gala, one could quote this to inspire artists to pursue excellence.
It's a shame how a lot of actors use theater as a stepping stone to film and television work; I think it shouldn't be treated that way. Maybe it's narcissism or something. I think we should always go back to it. I try and do a play a year, and I think that's really helped me.
Any swagger is just defense. When you're reminded so much of who you are by people - not a fame thing, but with my size, constantly, growing up - you just either curl up in a corner in the dark or you wear it proudly, like armor or something. You can turn it on its head and use it yourself before anybody else gets a chance.
Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I'm seemingly O.K. with it, I can't preach how to be O.K. with it. I don't think I still am O.K. with it. There's days when I'm not.
I think actors get too comfortable. I like being uncomfortable as an actor because it keeps you alive. I don't know, I think it's important.
Dwarves are still the butt of jokes. It's one of the last bastions of acceptable prejudice.
Call me a midget, but just be real. I am all for correct terms, but please don't tiptoe around feelings. Don't be too careful, because that shuts you off from people.
If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.
Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready made products we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'readymades aided' and also works of assemblage.
From a technical viewpoint, I have certain things I'd like to present in my solos. To do this, I have to get the right material. It has to swing, and it has to be varied.
The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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