Frank Stella Quotes

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

I don't know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we're all pretty much insane.

We as beings are very contradictory, complicated creatures that work in our best interest and against our best interest. In a certain way, I want my work to have all that messiness.

You get into moods - like, if somebody does something to you, then you're angry for maybe 30 seconds, or maybe 30 years. I was always interested in capturing those awful, unflattering things that everybody goes through - those hot moments, captured in ice.

Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters.

I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right - we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That's attractive to me.

Pain seems to be easier, or melancholy seems to be easier to portray in a character. I don't know if that's because I'm a human being or because I'm an Irishman or both.

One of the things I constantly think about as a writer is the way in which people are full of contradictions - there's all this contradictory information inside a human personality.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

We've all got darkness inside us. And I've got quite a lot of darkness.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

Some of the greatest stuff that I watch, that I'm drawn to, is deeply flawed human beings, because they're representing a part of us that might not be all of us but the part we're most afraid to look at, and so we get to vicariously experience it through this character.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

I sometimes feel that I'm impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick, but I love it.

What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too

It’s strange,” Moominmamma thought. “Strange that people can be sad, and even angry because life is too easy. But that’s the way it is, I suppose. The only thing to do is to start life afresh.

The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.

She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strength

Lyndon Johnson was thirteen of the most interesting and difficult men I ever met. He could be as couth as he was uncouth, as magnanimous as malicious, at times proud and sensitive, at times paranoid and darkly uneasy with himself. Freud would have had a field day with him.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bare ass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.