Chris Crutcher Quotes

Young people deserve to be portrayed with depth.

I just want to make sure that I'm taking roles that are positive, real, honest reflections of African-Americans because I do think the media can put African-American women in the background. Then, unfortunately, what happens is, subconsciously, our culture begins to assess that as reality.

Women should be portrayed as they are, authentically and truthfully.

In my books my characters experience things as they are. My books allow youth an honest look at important issues affecting them. As adults we want to believe things like sex abuse or drug use are not happening anymore, or happening less and less, but that's not the case and we need to acknowledge that. We can't make life prettier for youth, but we can arm them.

To me, the responsibility of an actor is to recreate humanity honestly. I never feel like an actor, I always look at it from a blue collar perspective.

Give young people a greater voice. They are the future and they are much wiser than we give them credit for.

It's really rare to get a teenage role that resembles something of what it's like to be a young person, that isn't a cliché or a stereotype.

I don't want to be a stereotype; I want a character that's aspirational.

Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow.

I've got to show life as I see it.

We chose to do a reality show with my husband Dean McDermott, because we wanted to give the reality of our situation, not to kind of mask it if the things got kind of uncomfortable. So we pretty much put it all out there and I think the viewers will appreciate that.

I like to speak with the youth, and I like to hear the youth. They always put me in difficulty. They tell me things that I haven't thought of, or that I've partly thought of. The restless youth, the creative youth, I like them!

I love the idea of creating a sort of nuanced portrait of kids that they're not all perfect. They're kind of misfits but not in a picturesque, hip way, they're really, really kids that are not entirely great.

Because I want every kid to be viewed as a person rather than as a member of a certain race does not mean that I'm not black enough. . . . Do they want me to be positive just for black kids and negative for everybody else?

And there's also not enough films that are more of a imitation of what real life looks like.

I kept trying to tell people that just because I was young didn't mean I could speak for all young people.

When you're going to try and have people talk in a room and actually reflect life as we know it and have people recognize themselves and their own street and their own house in it, well then you're aiming for the high country and it's a much bigger gamble. You can interview all the marketing gurus and the people in charge of, you know, the people you gotta fight with in order to get your seats here, and they all talk about release dates and counterprogramming. At the end of the day, it's gotta be a good movie.

By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.

I don't think being flawed is a bad thing for a character... nor do I think it's a bad thing for a person in life, because that's how we all are.

We have to step up as adults and try to guide our youth.

Theresa Rebeck's writing is so scarily funny. I just love how unapologetic she is with her writing: she doesn't try to make her characters likeable or heroic, she just really makes them human. Hopefully, the audience is able to love them in the end - or have whatever feelings that they want to have about all of them - but I love that she doesn't have that agenda. That is something that, as an actress, was really appealing to me; to just get to be in this group of people who are complicated and very human.

I think the hardest thing about the part is the responsibility that you feel playing something that is so real and resonant in our times. There are people coming home right now with those stories, and I'm just an actress pretending to be that person. You hope that you can shed some light on somebody's predicament.

The Czech movies, the quality movies, are trying to show the life in the country as it is, in an entertaining way, while in America, the majority of movies are wonderful fairy tales.

I'm always thinking about that young girl or young boy who doesn't quite know if their music, their messaging, their imaging, their voice is going to pop, if people are going to understand them. So I represent the other and those who feel like they don't even want to be normal. They embrace the things that make them unique.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!