We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
My purpose in performing is to communicate the joy I experience in living.
It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.
The whole experience of working on this movie was so fun, and I had more fun working on that than I've had on anything else. I had more fun working than on my days off.
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
Some Pulitzer winners - novelists - have confided to me that getting the prize screwed them up. It messed with their heads. That hasn't been my experience.
It's such a pleasurable experience to look back, and all of the fun I had just comes rushing back.
My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind ...
Depression, if it's an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.
The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.
The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to.
You can tell when you watch a movie, usually, what the actors' experience was on the movie, because even the smallest of roles were interesting.
I want to experience that massive adrenalin rush when you step into a new stadium, all the more so when that Olympic Stadium is packed full of people waving British flags.
Part of me wonders what it would have been like to have had my first experience of India in a normal way, rather than through the eyes of a film.
There's never been a mathematical equation that says a good experience making a movie equates to a good movie, or a bad experience on a set is going to lead to a bad movie.
In my experience victims are more concerned with helping their families understand that they are still connected to them. In some rare experiences information comes through that helps understand what happened.
As football players you have all the experience on the field. You don't have the experience off the field.
I loved being in the Senate. That was a wonderful experience.
For me, an ideal novel is a dialogue between writer and reader, both a collaborative experience and an intimate exchange of emotions and ideas. The reader just might be the most powerful tool in a writer's arsenal.
