Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes

There are always great deals of humanity in the characters that have been offered to me.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

I love hearing other people's stories, and I freely admit I'm scavenging for material through their conversations, but really, at the same time, I'm living an ordinary life.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes.

Hopefully, any character I play has an anchor in reality.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

Somehow I find it easier to inhabit characters if they are a little bit pathetic. I do seem to have an affinity with pathetic people.

I'm very drawn to the human condition and the emotional aspects of stories. It's what's not on the page that I get excited about.

Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating

For me, the key is always trying to find the connection between the audience and the character I'm playing. That's important to me, in any work I do.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

You can’t hate someone whose story you know.

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

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

He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.

So we go, so little knowing what we touch and what touches us as we talk! We drop out a common piece of news, "Mr. So-and-so is dead, Miss Such-a-one is married, such a ship has sailed," and lo, on our right hand or on our left, some heart has sunk under the news silently - gone down in the great ocean of Fate, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. And this - God help us! - is what we call living!

Like anything, you've gotta find the humanity in the characters.

Pity drowns in numbers.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.