David Burke > Quotes

“Writing! There's nothing like it! Well, you would know! You sit down in a corner. By yourself. With a sheet of paper and an old ballpoint. And out it comes! While the world, and all the steps in it, can go hang!

Of course, it's often rubbish. Tedious, boring, over the top. But then you hit your stride for a few yards, and you feel wonderful! You find a phrase that exactly expresses what you want to say about something. You read it back to yourself again and again. It feels good. You read it again the next day; it still feels good.”
― David Burke, The Copenhagen Papers

“I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may be of course what happens to Hamlet--he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck with it.
[...]
Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too.
[...]
But there is a third and wholly subversive track that intrudes itself at intervals, full of phantom thoughts and feelings that come and go of their own volition. This ghost train of random musings is, of course, to be discouraged, but it can never be entirely denied. As Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, say in the play: "So many things we think about at the same time. Our lives and our physics...All the things that come into our heads out of nowhere.”
― David Burke, The Copenhagen Papers

“Nebraska is raw, primitive, ancient, other-worldly, spiritual, nihilistic, heartbreaking, horrifying and a whole bunch of other things that come to you like apparitions whenever you enter its province (ideally under cover of darkness).”
― David Burke, Heart of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska

“Nebraska will transcend Springsteen, will immortalise him as a writer, because of what it says about civilisation in the range of its complexity--the beauty, the ugliness, the tenderness, the cruelty, the love, the hate, the doubt, the fear-- and because of what it says about the loneliness that lies at the heart of us all.”
― David Burke, Heart of Darkness: Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska