Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Quillen

Quillen’s line is a neat little pin aimed at the overinflated balloon of “authenticity.” In an era when American culture was professionalizing everything from salesmanship to celebrity, he’s stripping acting of its most romantic alibi: that great performance equals great feeling. His journalist’s sensibility shows in the distinction. Emotion is private weather; expression is a public instrument. The actor’s job isn’t to drown in the storm, but to steer the boat so the audience feels the waves.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial: if you equate acting with being emotional, you excuse sloppiness as sincerity. You reward the performer who melts down on cue, and you miss the craft required to make a single raised eyebrow land like a plot twist. Quillen is defending technique - timing, control, physicality, voice - against the cultural temptation to treat intensity as proof of truth. He’s also quietly widening the charge beyond the stage. The same confusion shows up in politics, pulpits, and newsrooms: we trust the person who seems to feel most, not the one who can communicate clearly.

Context matters. Quillen wrote in the early 20th century, when theater was competing with film’s close-ups and the rising cult of personality. Expression became both more scrutinized and more commodified. His sentence functions like a debunking caption under the myth of the suffering artist: emotion is raw material; performance is the finished product. The line works because it refuses sentimentality while still taking feeling seriously - it insists the audience deserves more than your tears. It deserves your control.