A Quote by John Coltrane

I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.
The criteria [to take or refuse the role] is that I would love to have some kind of dialogue or communication with the director. I need to understand that we can communicate and that we like communication. That's something I have to have a strong feeling about. Secondly, I have to find the script intriguing or interesting. I don't have to understand the whole script, but I do have to find it intriguing. If those two things are present, that would probably be a yes.
History matters. It matters whether we tell the truth about what happened centuries ago, and it matters whether we tell the truth about more recent history. It matters because if we can't we will never be able to face the present, guaranteeing that our future will be doomed.
I remember working on a show, and feeling so insecure about whether I looked attractive enough to do a love scene. It was weird because I couldn't understand why I wasn't feeling beautiful, even though I knew I was.
If nothing matters, then even the thought that nothing matters doesn't matter. And if it doesn't matter whether anything matters or not, then there's no real difference between believing nothing matters and believing something matters.
Only when you understand people, they may understand you. So even though you do not say anything, if you understand people there is some communication.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.
Lack of feeling in an emotional sense is responsible for the way some singers do our songs. They don't understand and are too old to grasp the feeling. Beatles are really the only people who can play Beatle music.
I've done and said a lot of things when I was younger that I don't know if I even understood what I was doing or why I was doing it. There's a lot of compassion in understanding what people go through and even in trying to understand why a person would act the way they do. I was a very reactive person, and I did things that were just really bizarre; I don't think people understood it at all.
It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?
I thought that love was a river, endless and deep. I thought it merely happened, washing over you like water. It was nothing to search for, nothing to force. I didn't understand that even when we can't control our fate, we alone have the last say in matters of the heart. We can give it freely, even in the worst of times, even when it isn't returned.
The feeling you get from playing to a good audience is hard to describe without sounding as though you are talking silly. But reaction is important. You might feel in yourself that you're doing it ok but it's when you get the live reaction that you know you're doing it right.
Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.
I started in theater; I did theater in New York for 14 years before I even thought about doing movies - I never thought about being in a film; it just never occurred to me.
I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication.
Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.
Somehow I know there was something so right about my doing Frankenstein and taking so long over it that I've probably been laying some ghost inside myself. It was a very necessary job for me to do, but it'll take some time to recover from it.
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