Martin Donovan Quotes

What I am is a thinking, feeling human being compelled by history.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

Understanding history means knowing what motivates you.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there.

We're coming to the peak, I think soon, before we have to come back to, like, humanity. Humanity needs to look, and it hasn't been looking for so long.

I don't know why I developed a social consciousness, but I really think I have a consciousness; I feel connected to everything and everybody in the world.

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of others.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

We are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs.

Know thy history. Let it horrify you; let it inspire you.

I take time to be with people, and I learn a lot.

Sometimes, to move into the future, you must go back the past.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

One of my pleasures is observing people's behavior and pointing out the inconsistencies that we all sort of have at the center of our lives.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

I love to learn about people.

My agenda... is to learn about people.

I've realised that my strength is writing around people.

The older you get the more you realize that life is more than just basketball. Your vision of the world gets much wider, and you're not the centre of it no more. You understand that you're a moving part and that you have other responsibilities.

Binaries aside, we are the products of our relationships with our identities - cities we have built, bodies we have embraced, kindred souls we've cherished, our memories, our dreams, the fears we hide, the pain we hold - identities that cannot be reduced to a collection of labels.

I had nothing to talk about until I, like, lived.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.