Brechtian Quotes & Sayings

There's a palace in your head, boy. Learn to live in it always. — Grant Morrison

I know a bit about his [Sirk] life, but it's more about his style than biography. He was European and came out of a theater background, and could easily be defined as 'Brechtian.' He was expressionistic in his films, and was an example of those intensely intellectual artists who ended up working for American studios, and was handed the Ladies Home Journal and asked to adapt the stories for the screen. He found ways to use his artistry to make them interesting and nuanced, while critiquing American values in the process. — Todd Haynes

To go to USC without a scholarship is next to impossible. — Jerry Buss

The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years. — Bayard Taylor

I try to ask visual questions. I'll ask what someone was wearing, if that seems relevant. If possible, I'll walk over the same ground that they're depicting. Of course, I can never get it precisely as it was. — Joe Sacco

But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey?
Nothing, you say? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men!
Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world? — Jules Verne

I'm not going to tell people how to live their life and I surely wouldn't tell people my life is the way you should be living. People get to choose what they do want to do with their life and I appreciated that. — Abby Wambach

Well, there are those who would say it's a form of aggression."
"What is?"
"A surprise. — David Mamet

Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. Its aim is to jolt us, not "into thinking," as in a Brechtian formulation, but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action: "To us," as an executive at Coca-Cola puts it, "communication is message assimilation
the respondent must be shown to behave in some way that proves they [sic] have come to accept the message, not merely to have received it. — Mark Crispin Miller

Whoever calls on the Name of the Lord God, shall be saved. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I model jeans. You need a bum for those. — Georgia May Jagger

The dilemma of Brechtian performance is that, for all of Brecht's emphasis on rationality and the undermining of theatrical illusion, the actor must convincingly portray something that she is not. — Philip Auslander

He communicated via napkin which was probably a Brechtian alienation device.
wonder if it possible for you to sleep on stage because I've got poem where I say things about you while you sleep?
I asked to hear the poem first and he wrote: whole point is your not knowing.
Hard to believe they fund his PhD. — Joe Dunthorne

I am a book-collector, a proud avocationist in what Eric Quayle (wrongly) asserts to be the "least vicious" of hobbies (we are quite savage). We collectors are puzzled and often piqued unpleasantly by the common, absurd notion whereby we are only a pack of myopic, semi-crazed old pedants fretting over a book's colophon, dull dogs full of humorless zeal and no conversation, who suck our fingers free of pounce. — Paul Theroux

Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check? — Stephen King