Jerrod Carmichael Quotes

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.

Some of the best actors think they're terrible; that's what keeps you connected to a vulnerability that makes it possible for people to empathize with you.

Whenever a film allows you to think and feel and take it beyond the moment, I think it's achieved something. And 'Funny Games' does that.

If your character is just out there acting a fool, viewers are gonna say, 'Why am I watching this?' But if he's whispering, 'I don't really want to die,' there's a level of vulnerability cemented in these bad characters.

'Masaan' was a small role, but people connected with it. I loved playing a man who does not have many complexities in life. I was inspired by my father for this role. You find such characters in novel or in stories. You don't find such parts in movies where characters are either good, bad, or grey.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

I may make you angry or make you feel sorry for me, but in the end, you appreciate my show because it's not one-dimensional.

We don't fall in love with perfect people. We fall in love with complex ones.

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

With the tone of the show, like a lot of the films, the Marvel creative team has found a way to bridge really exciting stuff that has real stakes. They balance some of the action stuff that the fans of the comics really want to see with characters that people can relate to and who are very human.

Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.

I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

I want to experience a performance on all levels - I want goose bumps and I want to leave the movie or play arguing about something that's unresolved.

At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that's very complex, or human.

The power of this experience [fatherhood] can never be explained. It is one of those joyful codings that rumbles in the species far below understanding. When it is experienced it makes you one with all men in a way that fills you with warmth and harmony.

I think human beings probably resonate with audiences more than bunnies, but who knows?

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales.

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

Is that all we need? Can the way we say each other's names encompass all our history, all our love, all our fear, all our fights, all our reunions, all of what we know about each other, all of what we don't know?

I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.

I suppose books mean more than people to me.

Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be.