Rasika Dugal Quotes

Characters can be mysterious and you're not really sure which way they might turn at a given point.

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

I think to truly not know what to expect out of the story - to create a world where nothing is guaranteed - is sort of the backbone of 'Atlanta.'

Life is so unlike theory.

I like people to be surprised by the turn of events. I don't want things just to be pat and formulaic. If there's some sort of internal combustion in the character or a desire to change the way things are going, that makes for conflict, which is the essence of drama.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

We never really know what's around the corner when we're filming - what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

I don't know what's going to happen in life, so I don't think it's fair that I know what's going to happen in 'Homeland.'

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

The more ambivalent you are and the more uncertain you are, then you can get something that you cannot anticipate.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

On a TV show, you don't know where the character is going.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

I like complicated characters.

President Lyndon Johnson was very, very unpredictable. We never knew for sure what he is going to do next, and he preferred to have it that way; if he could do something as a complete surprise, that was his preference.

The problem in cinema is that you can never predict what will happen.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

I do sometimes play characters that are a bit ambiguous. You've got to be brave about that sort of stuff. I like the sense of people not feeling too secure, not immediately knowing what they have in front of them.

I don't know that I'd necessarily want to see into the future. I don't want to know what's happening next.

I think when you don't know where you stand with someone, they can surprise you in their goodness and their badness, and that makes them human.

Hmmm... I never get the answer I think I'm going to get.