I don't want to die an old lady.
Edith PiafRead
Tell me what you'd like to hear me sing. I'll sing whatever you like, after which I'll take up a collection, if you don't mind.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the joy of performing and giving people what they desire through art.
Edith Piaf's quote reflects the essence of an artist's role in connecting with their audience. By inviting others to express their wishes about what she should sing, she demonstrates her willingness to tailor her art to meet the desires of her listeners, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between performer and audience. The mention of taking up a collection serves to underline the transactional aspect of art, where creativity meets appreciation and support from the audience.
In practice
This quote could be used at a community event where local artists are asked to perform.
I don't want to die an old lady.
I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears.
Use your faults, use your defects; then you're going to be a star.
People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.
Americans want beauties, not me. I’m not the Parisian bombshell they expected. Can you see me as a chorus girl? Where’s my feather up the ass? They think I’m sad, they’re dumb. I don’t connect to them
I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?
The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
I am a conventional science fiction author. But that said, once your work is published, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the readers and they will derive all sorts of interpretations.
When I'm dancing, I'm not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself. My soul dances with the angels, and my body dances with my wife.
I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.
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