Jeffrey Eugenides Quotes

If we can tell a good story with characters audiences can care about, I'd like to think that prejudices can fall aside and people can just experience the story and these characters for the human beings that they are.

You don't have to treat people differently. You may be living a different lifestyle, but the person living that different lifestyle still can relate to anybody and have the same amazing personality of the guy from North Philly.

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Everyone working on 'Tyrant' wants to present the world and the issues in it in an intelligent, open, fair, non-reductive kind of way. For the actors, we have to try and make these stories as truthful and compelling as possible.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

In fact, some reviewers have said that as they got into the story they forgot that the protagonist is a black woman. They were moved by the story - by the people as a whole - and not by the little things.

With literature, sometimes a book is presented in the media as being say, a Muslim story or an African story, when essentially it's a universal story which we can all relate to it, no matter what race or social background we come from.

I don't try and write strong female characters or strong male characters, I just try and write, hopefully, strong characters and sometimes they happen to be female.

I am a cisgender woman who has always had a lot of female friends. While many of us have traits in common, none of us will ever be exactly the same. So it's enormously important to me that my female characters be people, and be allowed to be whatever they need to be.

Every person you meet has a story.

I just think that good stories are stories that reflect ourselves back at us and each other.

I just always want to play people. I don't want it to be necessarily that you relate to the character as female or male, but that you relate to them as a person. That's the driving force.

I don't believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don't think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that, but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person.

I know it's 'Dear White People,' and you can imprint all kinds of concessions about what the show might be about on the title, but my goal was never to, like, educate white people. My goal was always to create characters that you can relate to and fall in love with.

I'm an 18-year-old girl, at the end of the day. I'm a human person, and so are the people that I work with.

Human beings are created with empathy. Art serves that purpose. So why should I be disinterested in a character who's a man, and why should a man shy away from a show that's female-driven?

I prefer to do roles that I can relate to.

While the books I read as a child lacked diversity in the strict sense, they didn't lack values. Reading, I didn't see me externally, but I felt me - my humanity.

I want my audiences to be as open-minded as my characters.

I want every character be an outsider in some way.

I guess you could say that no matter what the characters are enduring, I try to make them retain their humanity. Their self-absorbed, grouchy, selfish, aggravating humanity.

People are people, and they want to know about their own experiences.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.