Jack Falahee Quotes

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

To invent a story, or admirably and thoroughly tell any part of a story, it is necessary to grasp the entire mind of every personage concerned in it, and know precisely how they would be affected by what happens; which to do requires a colossal intellect: but to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself; and thousands of people are capable of feeling this or that noble emotion, for one who is able to enter into all the feelings of someone sitting on the other side of the table.

I like stories with lots of psychology.

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.

Psychology and acting are very closely linked. It's just about studying people and how they work. It can be an incredible discipline and exercise.

I think fiction, for me, is a way of trying to understand why people do the things they do - and trying to explain what is, at heart, illogical.

The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it.

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

Literature has become too psychological.

All who know their own minds know not their own hearts.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

Whenever I do anything, even the most simple character, I need to twist it somehow, make it more challenging, in terms of psychology and storytelling. I can't just do it straight.

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

I think the dark psychology of human beings is very interesting as an artist.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

I think all interesting characters have some kind of a complex.

One of the many joys of being an actor is to understand the human psychology.

You meet people and you hear the way they talk and the way they behave, and that subconsciously gets fed into the characters you create 'cause you have to make them flesh and blood somehow.

I write books because I have always been fascinated by stories and language, and because I love thinking about what makes people tick. Writing a story... 'The Giver' or any other... is simply an exploration of the nature of behavior: why people do what they do, how it affects others, how we change and grow, and what decisions we make along the way.

When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

...the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.