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| Marlon Brando |
Interview with Marlon Brando
Conducted by James Grissom By Telephone 1990
Life will tear you apart and destroy you,
each and every day.
People are suffering and starving and dying;
people are lying and cheating;
resources are spread far too thin.
We have to live, and we have to love.
We can love in many ways, and I am really only capable,
at times, of loving through my art, my work, so that’s what I should do.
I have to learn to love others more fully.
We have to love everything.
I think the world improves–the entire world–
when we appreciate a beautifully crafted sentence in a book;
when we remember our mothers as a song plays;
when we watch an actor giving his or her all to a scene.
We can take this love,
this incredible feeling of connection and gratitude,
and we can share it with another person.
I think this is how we can immediately
heal the world and ourselves.
Interview with Marlon BrandoConducted by James GrissomBy Telephone 1991
We tolerate and we delay the inevitable pain
of being human by various means,
and the creation of art was the honorable route I chose.
Others find a God, a spirit, a schedule of spiritual exercises
to stave off the pain of being human.
Others turn to drugs or sex or food,
and I have made my way down that fleshly path.
Dull the pain; deny the past; make the future bright
with sweat and cum and shiny eyes of desire.
Eventually, we are made still--
by tragedy or age or both.
We have to sit and think and reflect,
and we have to face our humanity.
It has always been there, this task,
but we have pushed it away, tamped it down,
covered it like Blanche's naked light bulb.
So here we are, facing our humanity.
So here we are, facing our humanity.
Where do we begin?
