Sydney Pollack Quotes

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

I wanted to deal with someone's idea of their relationship.

The thing is, every relationship is different, and when you start talking about your problems, other people tend to talk about theirs.

There is one particular argument that I call our 'ancient war.' If it could be summed up in one phrase, it would be, 'You don't get it. You don't understand what it's like to be me living with you.' There is such truth in that statement. None of us can really appreciate what it is like to be the other person, what that point of view feels like.

What I really like about Woody Allen's films is that there's a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about - how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them.

I think compassion is important but love fizzles out eventually. But if there is compassion in a relationship, things can always be worked out.

In a relationship when things are really great you don't need to say anything and just enjoy the other person. Sometimes with a couple, it gets dark and you don't know what to say and that silence can last all day. Other times you don't want to stop talking because you don't want to lose one another.

Forcing people together is an enjoyable conflict to watch, but I think it's even more enjoyable if they love each other.

Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They're convinced that we wage war simply because we don't know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the skills we need to develop them.

Men are fair, and they have learned not to personalize anger - they can disagree with you and argue to the bone, but afterward they still consider you a nice person with whom the underlying human relationship need not be altered.

But for me, it feels like a natural extension of what I've been doing: exploring relationships. Here you have two relationships and we can explore how difficult it is for people to be together.

I think that can happen, that two people can love each other and not be able to get on at all.

It's very hard to get the dynamics where two people can stimulate each other and be happy.

I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.

I am oftentimes the ear for some people that I know and love. Which I like being. I don't know if I'd like being a marriage counselor, though, because that's too deep for me.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That's definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

Relationships, it seems to me, are timeless. What works between two people always works; what doesn't is always troublesome. Over time, people learn - or not - how to negotiate what's difficult, but that doesn't mean the misfit has gone away entirely.

It takes two to make a relationship, but only one to screw it up.

When you're close to somebody, you can never really know how they're experiencing the world.

All our relationships are person-to-person. They involve people seeing, hearing, touching, and speaking to each other; they involve sharing goods; and they involve moral values like generosity and compassion.

In marriage, there's a lot of ignoring each other, which is hard to fake on-screen.

I love watching how people who are in love with each other deal with each other. Every time I've had a fight with an ex-girlfriend, at the time they're horrible, but when I look back they're often funny and weird, and that kind of stuff makes me laugh.

I think really good drama comes down to real human emotion. That's what makes us all tick, and that's what I've always been drawn to when it comes to scripts is real human emotion and dealing with that.

There are interesting tensions that will naturally occur with any relationship. No matter what setting, what era, the tension is very, very real. It's basic human tension.

Any relationship has its strengths and weakness.