Favourite Inspirational Quotes

"Find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible... Miracles begin with you."- Deepak Chopra

"The outer work will never be puny if the inner work is great." -Meister Eckhart

“An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.”- Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.”- Ludwiig Wittgenstein

“If you can’t say it, point to it.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The theatre begins with a disagreement between what you see and what you hear.”- Friedrich Durrenmatt

"When God calls me to account He’ll ask one question: “Why didn’t you become you?”- Anon

"People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg." -Anthony de Mello

“Most decisions, possibly all, have been made on some deeper level and my going through a reasoning process to arrive at them seems at least redundant. The question: ‘What do I want to do?’ may be a fearful reaction to the subconscious decision I have already made.” -Hugh Prather

“Some people walk in the rain. Others just get wet.” -Roger Miller

“I wish the stage were as narrow as a tightrope dancer’s wire, so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.” -Goethe

“When we have Francis of Assisi and Hitler in us somewhere, we will inevitably realize what the theatre can and will be some day.” -Michael Chekhov

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself, and dares to become involved in experimenting with his own life.” –Herbert Otto

"Oh crap, I've wasted my life." -Comic Book Store Guy from "The Simpsons" at the moment just before a neutron bomb strikes him.

“The Universe will pay you to be yourself and do what you really love.” –Shakti Gawain

“Do what you love… the money will follow.”- Marsha Sinetar

"Love like you'll never get hurt. You've got to dance, dance, dance like nobody's watching. It's got to come from the heart if you want it to work.”- Glenda Jackson

“A love of excellence makes the small thing a source of satisfaction. On the inner planes, thorough work creates archetypes that ensoul the object as long as it exists.”- Flower A. Newhouse

“If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.” – Raymond Inmon

“The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”- Percy Byshe Shelley

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them!”- Henry David Thoreau

“When a little bubble of joy appears in your sea of consciousness take hold of it and keep expanding it. Meditate on it and it will grow larger. Keep puffing at the bubble until it breaks its confining walls and becomes a sea of joy.” -Paramahansa Yogananda

“Fear: the best way out is through.” Helen Keller

“Imagine you only have one year to live. What important things would you be doing? How would you be allotting your time to accomplish the most you could? This exercise is one method of going after your priorities.” –Denis Waitley

“What we vividly imagine, ardently desire, enthusiastically act upon, must inevitably come to pass.”- Colin P. Sisson

“A rockpile ceases to be a rockile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Fuck 'Que sera sear'... 'Que quiero sera’:- whatever I WILL, will be.” - Anon

“Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty of reality.” -Albert Einstein

“You never live so fully as when you gamble with your own life.” -Anthony de Mello

“You don’t have to suffer continual chaos in order to grow.”- John C. Lilly

“Go and learn from your teachers and your religions until you are bored. Then seek the answer that feels right within your soul.” –Ramtha

"Empathy, I would say is presence. Pure presence to what is alive in a person at this moment, bringing nothing in from the past. The more you know a person, the harder empathy is. The more you have studied psychology, the harder empathy really is. Because you can bring no thinking in from the past. If you surf, you'd be better at empathy because you will have built into your body what it is about. Being present and getting in with the energy that is coming through you in the present. It is not a mental understanding... In empathy, you don't speak at all. You speak with the eyes. You speak with the body. If you say any words at all, it's because you are not sure you are with the person. So you may say some words. But the words are not empathy. Empathy is when the other person feels the connection to with what's alive in you." -Marshall B. Rosenberg

And- (of course!) ...

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect…"– E.M. Forster

Living Adventurously

I cannot begin to express how enriched I feel knowing I have at long last found my spiritual home in the Society of Friends. It permits me to explore my spirituality unfettered by any petty obligations and meaningless rules, and I love the the sheer thrill of searching for God's will for me without any guilt, or having to adhere to any superstitious, narrow-minded creeds.

Of course, whatever Quakers may say there actually is a ritual to the Sunday worship. There may be no ministers, no liturgy, no bells or smells, yet a basic ritualised form is inherent in the sublime, patient waiting in contemplative silence, periodically resulting in someone speaking and spilling their Inner Light, and then other souls kind of 'riffing' on that theme over the course of the hour. It feels like improv actually, except more spiritual of course, and much more satisfying! It's so incredibly simple, and yet it works so much better than the dreary prescriptive services and catechisms I endured for so many years both as a Catholic and as a Protestant. It happens in the present moment, and it feels infinitely more creative, organic and authentic. It reminds me so much of when I was improvising with Razed Curtain- those rare but exquisite, even graceful times when we'd do the 'Howard' improv and it worked. All the threads brought by the individuals in the ensemble mysteriously weaving, intertwining, connecting (that word again) and against all the odds making coherent sense, while at the same time creating something new and far richer than the sum of all its parts.

The 5 Quaker testimonies: Truth and Integrity, Simplicity, Peace and Justice are manifested in tangible, corporate understanding (conviction actually) that true faith springs from a deeply held belief in living our lives according to ones own spiritual experience. This is vital to me as a person, and as an artist. I no longer have to struggle with the awkward and uncomfortable tensions of tolerating stuff I don't believe in, just because the pope, the archbishop or anyone else tells me I should. I feel I can grow alongside others who will support that growth without interfering, as I support them.

And what was even more exciting for me- and amazingly synchronicitous- was that I discovered just a couple of weeks ago that since the late 1990s hundreds of small 'Experiment with Light' groups have sprung up as part of the Quaker movement all over the UK. These groups were set up in response to Rex Ambler's 1996 book, Light to Live By, which drew pararllels between George Fox's ideas about centering down for silent worship and philosopher Eugene Gendlin's therapeutic technique of Focusing, a practice I have been using in my own inner work for the past 16 years. This was to me an unmistakeable sign from God that I had at long last found my spiritual home. Discovering this had the feeling and quality of a perfectly appropriate gift from the Divine, more than i'd even dare pray for. A miracle actually! I feel so abundantly blessed, unspeakably thankful to Him for this, my heart keeps leaping for joy when I think of it!

Since I joined two months ago I have been deeply enriched by meditating on the 42 "Advices and Queries" which begin Quaker Faith and Practice. These Advices and Queries are not laid down as rules ("... For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life."), but are really a guide, a reminder of how we might transform our lives "with a measure of light which is pure and holy".

And my favourite one makes me feel so ... I don't know...inspired, so liberated, saved I guess!

It speaks to the very heart of where I am right now, and it reads thus:

"Live adventurously. When choices arise, do you take the way that offers the fullest opportunity for the use of your gifts in the service of God and the community? Let your life speak."

(Advices and Queries, 1:27)

Isn't that just so cool!! :-)

All of us are Actors

"All of us can sing, though only few of us are actually singers. All of us can paint, though only few of us are actually painters. And all of us are actors, although usually we pretend we aren't."

Marianne Williamson, The Gift of Change

The Christ's Breath

I am a hole in a flute
that the Christ’s breath moves through–
listen to the music.

Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet

Tightrope

Sanford Meisner, the acting teacher who first devised those repetition exercises we do each week at the Actors' Bothy used to have a little known quotation by the Germanic poet-playwright, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, displayed on the wall outside his Neighbourhood Theatre office in New York. And sometimes, especially at the end of a frustrating teaching day, Goethe's epigram sums up (better than anything else I can think of) my feelings about the arrogance and laziness of most would-be 'actors'.

"I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of the tightrope dancer, so that no incompetent would dare step upon it."


Swingeing... And all the more delicious for it. :-))

Remembering Love

I know first-hand the agonies of being trapped in a pedestrian, workmanlike production in which I have little faith or any sense of real commitment. This will happen far more often than I care to admit even to myself. I hope once more that this will not be the case with the play I am about to start work on. But no matter how noble or high-minded I may profess to be, there's always that nagging fear that I can fall from grace, that my enthusiasm and spirit, my talent will be disfigured permanently by involvement in a ‘turkey’. So it remains tempting to resign myself to such truisms as ‘We always fail’, 'Perfection is an impossibility', or ‘Enough is enough’, particularly in a non-professional production. ‘We are tightrope walkers, and we’re bound to fall off sooner or later’. And if we are honest this failure is as much our own fault as it is our collaborators, the business-mentality, the “fucking" director (I don't mean you, Marta!), or the audience.

But what I say is this:

If we cannot change others then we still have a moral and artistic duty at least to change ourselves.

That is the grown-up actor's response.

We have to be honest. We actors are frequently driven by our own petty, selfish, superficial (if understandable) motives: the itch to keep busy or “ticking over”, ambitions of “raising our profile”, mere habit, garnering critical acclamations for own talents, striving to be a “success”, a star. Whatever it may be that appears to keep us going we can so easily end up chasing our own tail. Perhaps more often it’s just some muddled combination of all of those petty motives that keeps us tail-chasing- obsessively questing after our old fire, all that youthful enthusiasm that drew us into the theatre in the first place. But whether it’s because of stubbornness, habit, self-denial, stupidity, nostalgia or just a refusal to wake up and smell the roses, still we stubbornly cling on. We become like priests who continue leading congregational prayer even though we have long since stopped being able to hear the voice of God. We are shamans who know our magic is a sham. We are leaders voted in on electoral promises we know will not be honoured. Yet we persist; we cling on.

But why? Why do we cling on? After all, we aren’t hypocrites; we are trying to tell the truth, aren’t we? We are not drudges; we’re artists! We are not empty vessels- in fact we suffer from the opposite problem; we are too full, filled to overflowing with the need to say…to say… something true!
I think the reason we cling on is because of Love. Love, pure and simple. Of course you may think that sounds like a vague aphorism, a cliché, and you’d be right. So vague it might seem virtually meaningless. “Love? Love of what exactly?” But I have come to believe your work as an actor lies in trying to find out what it is you love. The answer is utterly unique to every one of us, and indeed you may never define the precise nature of that love of which I write here. But it is our Purpose.

And your point is, caller?

Beyond the idea that the actor loves the theatre is the notion that Love is, or at least should be, the basis of all stage emotion. A character who expresses hatred in a play is not a real person in everyday life but a character on the stage, a fiction. The actor shouldn't be feeling "real" hatred but hatred as an artistic emotion, a hatred grounded in love. By providing the ground for this expression, love creates a distance, another dimension, which allows the actor to not become identified with the hatred but to present it, in effect as an art object. With this attitude of "love" we have the possibility of entering into all manifestations of life. That's what we as actors must do. The process does not have judgement of the character as its aim but a much, much deeper awareness. By noticing the differences between the self and The Other, the actor offers a space for that 'Other' to manifest whilst keeping a clear sense of difference. There is no possession here, where the self is taken over by the other (a la Strasberg). The actor is not a medium, nor is the other reduced to the everyday personality of the actor who happens to be playing him or her. Self and ‘the Other’ are allies in the creation of the performance. That relationship opens out further to include not just actor and character but also actor and actor; actor and audience. Allies in the creation of the performance. Not competitors, not enemies.
You must urge your higher self to be completely connected (that word again) with all your characters say and do, and connected by love. Without it you will always fall off the tightrope.

This is why I don't seek fame and I don't seek money per se. And even though it would be nice to have recognition and to be paid to act, for me it has always been more about love. I am still idealistic/ foolish enough to believe that if I get that right the rest will inevitably follow.

To finish, a couple of my favourite bits from Harold Clurman’s wonderful account of the history of the Group Theatre, "The Fervent Years".

"The world was and still is run by people for whom, whether they admit it or not, know it or not, life is printed on dollar bills. They are the people whose impulse and goal is power, the specific symbol of which is possessions and money. This is their supreme ideal, their philosophy, their religion. For the rest of the world, whether they confess it or not, the impulse and goal is one of love. There is a deep struggle forever in progress between the representative of these two impulses, just as there is a corresponding struggle in the hearts of most individual men."

"The objective of all our creative forces today must be- what it always was- to make man’s hands work in conformity with the movement of his free spirit, to make his active life the reflection of his noblest dreams, to make the deeds of all his days rise from the springs of his love. The tragedy of modern life is the forced separation and contradiction between the “way of the world” and the “way of man”, between the power motif of our external machinations and the love motif of our subjective desire. This ideal- to unite the world of spirit with the world of fact so that one is the mirror or consequence of the other- is thus both aesthetic and social. If this ideal lay at the roots of the artistic and social movements of the thirties, then both artist and man of action have a common ground from which to approach the great problems of our time.
If the theatre has no incentive or goal beyond that which prevails in any ordinary business, the theatre must lapse into the peculiar condition it is in at present. And if society itself eschews every ideal except that which is merely a matter of lip service- without roots in our deepest personal experience- it is unlikely that such ideals will ever find expression in the theatre. "

Bang on, Harold, my man. Bang on.

Inspiring Quotes

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. Dag Hammarskjold from Markings

Act from the within, from indeed the very heart of the within, from the innermost depths of being... the sanctuary that lieth behind the heart of man; the soul. Through feeling rather than thought is the pathway found." Mary Bruce Wallace from The Thinning of the Veil.

The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of the soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world. Nietzsche

If thou canst believe- all things are possible Mark 9:23

Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso

Only Connect

E.M. Forster's novel Howard's End.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...

These words have always spoken to me about the Art of Acting, and in all my subsequent blogs I hope to explore how the actor may achieve and sustain this "connection".

The actor's purpose is an inherently spiritual one: a very high calling which requires the fullest and deepest possible connection with the text, the heart of character, the audience, the actor's own soul and heart, mind and body... with God, in fact. As a Quaker I tend to call this the Inner Light, but the idea is the same. All of us who participate in this art, believers and non-believers, are seeking and exploring the promptings of Love and Truth. I believe that this Inner Light, and our connection with it, is the creative source of all we do, and all that we are.

Unfortunately our fearful egos, our small-selves, have a tendency to interfere with the quality of this connection. We watch ourselves in the wrong way, seeking to prove our worth, make our mark in the world, appeal to false idols like fame, wealth, attention, sex, power, critical acclaim; and we seek dodgy justification for our choices in ways which stifle the still, small voice within that would entreat us to remain connected. And so we live in fragments, as E.M. Forster puts it.

No longer.

"Only connect".

The unifying principle we seek as artists, and which will make us whole again, is Love. For the essence of what we do is compassion as we merge with the universal consciousness through the process called characterisation. Spiritual teachers tell us that we cannot truly love others until we love our selves. Love your character, and your Inner Light will shine into the world.