Akira Kurosawa Quotes

I think that just because the show is titled 'Awkward Black Girl' and it is a predominantly black cast doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to relate to these people. We're all human beings. We all essentially go through the same things when it comes down to it, so I don't I think that should limit who watches it.

No matter where you come from, we all share the same struggles as human beings, and my beginning is no different.

We are all human beings. We all go through a lot at certain times of our lives.

I'm inspired by day to day life, things that people go through, things that make people tick. Everybody has a story, so you try to put stories into songs and try to make it as entertaining as possible.

I had never heard anyone doing what my show does, which is put the focus on the human condition - whatever you're going through, good or bad, right or wrong, straight or gay, whatever. That human experience is the meat of the show.

What makes art powerful is a flash of recognition, a frightening encounter with something familiar about the human condition.

No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.... Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.

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

Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes.

In storytelling you kind of put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and look at it and recognize themselves inside it. So I feel that that in and of itself is a spiritual thing.

The wonderful thing about the theater is that it can emphasize BOTH our diversity AND our common humanity. In many ways, the world of Shakespeare (or Aeschylus or Racine) is totally different from our world; and yet any human being can look through the differences in dress and mores and discover our common problems, passions, and potentials.

Everyone has troubles. Finding yourself in the same boat with everyone else is the first sign of spirituality.

I aim to write songs in a way that you don't have to have gone to Ghana to relate to it, you really just have to have a heart.

A great novelist must open the reader's heart, allow the reader to remember the vastness and glory -- and shame and shabbiness -- of what it is to be human.

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.

The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.

Narrative and metaphysics alike become flimsy and frivolous if they venture too far from the home base of all humanism - the single, simple human life that we all more or less lead, with its crude elementals of nurture and appetite, love and competition, the sunshine of well-being and the inevitable night of death. We each live this tale. Fiction has no reason to be embarrassed about telling the same story again and again, since we all, with infinite variations, experience the same story.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

When you connect to a primal idea - life, death, hunger, hope, fear - any of those primal ideas are going to translate, and I think that's the thing that I've always been attracted to in my work.

Sex, love and death are universal and timeless dramatic themes.

Nothing human is foreign to us

Death has more in common with Love than you might imagine.

The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, there was such a variety and diversity of types of films that you could see. So many of them were really more about the human condition and about relationships between people, and they were smaller films that had a much greater impact on me as a human being.

I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time.