A Quote by Willem Dafoe

You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons. — © Willem Dafoe
You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.
Allow your softer, more intuitive, and less dominating feminine qualities to rise to the fore, so that you're surrendering rather than dominating, receiving rather than broadcasting, loving rather than fighting.
It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.
I just need to do something new.... I've got the big remote control of life in my hands, and I'm ready to start pushing some buttons.
I have a four year old and I'm telling you we did Nickelodeon last night and he embarrassed me. It was like one of those moments when I couldn't believe my kid is acting like this. I just had to just like walk away from him because he was really pushing my buttons.
That's one of those questions that would just love to have a pat answer. You know, poetry's job is to make us feel good. Poetry exists to allow us to express our innermost feelings. There isn't one role for poetry in society. There are many roles for poetry. I wrote a poem to seduce my wife. I wrote a poem when I asked her to marry me. Poetry got me laid. Poetry got me married.
Since our online libraries are so extensive, we think we can make all the right decisions about our personal health and well-being by pushing buttons. It's not intuitive anymore. That's the internet. Before the net, we would have gone to the community or our families to see what we should do. We often feel more isolated on our own little islands because of it.
Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinetisimal change ripples outward —ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter —maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.
I get off on pushing people's buttons sometimes.
Ultimately, at the end of it, it's just trying to get into that space where you feel like you're hitting the right thing and you're making music. And it feels intuitive rather than being counterintuitive.
The key to writing for Richard (Pryor) was to just push his buttons and then know when to push the buttons on your cassette recorder. You'd get him started, then surreptitiously start recording when he got inspired and started walking around the room and improvising in character. Then you'd get it all transcribed and take credit for it.
As a director, I have to do everything. As an actor, I'm just worried about one role, that's it. As a director, everything is important. Everything is something you have to be very detailed and specific about in telling a story. So for me, the job is far greater than just being the actor, there's a lot more responsibility creatively, technically.
I used to write my own versions of famous tales, such as William Tell or Robin Hood, and illustrate them myself, too. When I entered my teens, I got more into horror and science fiction and wrote a lot of short stories. A literary education complicated things and for many years I wrote nothing but poetry. Then I got back to story-telling.
I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.
When you're developing a story, for me anyway, it's all so important to get the script right, especially when you're telling the story of an icon. You've got to get it right. Otherwise, you'll get killed by critics and fans.
Well, let’s start with the maxim that the best writing is understated, meaning it’s not full of flourishes and semaphores and tap dancing and vocabulary dumps that get in the way of the story you are telling. Once you accept that, what are you left with? You are left with the story you are telling. The story you are telling is only as good as the information in it: things you elicit, or things you observe, that make a narrative come alive; things that support your point not just through assertion, but through example; quotes that don’t just convey information, but also personality.
All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
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