E. M. Forster Quotes

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

A movie is about human beings, about humanity.

Playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar was the most thrilling thing I've done. You get these speeches that were written for men, and you're running around like an action hero, climbing scaffolding and beating people up. It was very freeing.

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.

With BSG, sci-fi is the human experience taken beyond the envelope. When I first became involved with the project, I knew that I would be able to play a human being for many years, exploring and reflecting on issues that would impact people's lives.

What television gets to do, and there's a reason why 'S.H.I.E.L.D.' works as well as it does, is that it deals with the relationships. It deals with the very small, interpersonal ways that people both love and hate each other.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

It's harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.

You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they'll work just as well - any single one of them - because they're stories about people, they're stories about things.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

I am not interested in entertaining people. I think being an actor provides an opportunity to give people an experience they can connect to, reflect on, learn from, laugh at.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.

'Mission: Impossible' is fun. But for myself as an artist, I'm really more concerned with the human condition, the human experience, especially from an African American point of view.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

The most likely explanation is the most practical. 'Macbeth' is a very popular play with audiences. If you want to sell out a theater, just mount a production of 'Macbeth'. It's a short play, it's an exciting play, it's easy to understand, and it attracts great acting.

I had such an amazing experience on 'The Pillowman' that it was hard to think what else is going to live up to that.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

What's great about well-written material is, if you can shock with justifiable actions, that's the best.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

I love gritty drama. I'm passionate about films and drama that make you think - hard-hitting, gravelly characters.

All good, clean stories are melodrama; it's just the set of devices that determines how you show or hide it.

I prefer drama; I think character-driven drama is my favorite kind of stuff to go watch, and I like being challenged by that kind of stuff in that way.