Khaled Hosseini Quotes

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Character development is conflict.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.

It's fun to play characters with a past, but it's also fun to play any role that is what I would call a 'pressure cooker' kind of character, where the lid is on, and it's left to simmer throughout the movie.

Good TV is not about people being happy; it's drama.

We always try to go back to character: What do they want? What are they doing? What's in motion that they're dealing with? When things get particularly heavy, we will take a step back and look at who has some room to have some things lighter, funnier, or sweeter happen.

I've been in a long and happy relationship for 22 years and it's never inspired me to write anything. It's too good - nothing to say. Problems, conflict, that's what makes for good stories.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

If I really knew how to do good storytelling, I would be a writer. Mystery is not a huge part of it. ... It's tension, it's relationships. I think it's a struggle.

I truly believe that the job of an actor and the drive of an actor is simulating the internal journey in life which is to get deeper and deeper into our understanding of who we are.

As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.

A comic is a way of literally experiencing someone else's vision with a purity that I don't think any other medium offers; there are no technical, electronic or financial limitations; one only has to work harder to improve. Lately I think a new attitude has prevailed that comics aren't inherently an Art form, but that some cartoonists are genuinely artists.

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

A good actor knows exactly what the camera wants, what the sound wants, where to find the light and how to tell a good through line and journey.

I enjoy both acting and screenwriting, in completely different ways. You have more creative freedom with writing because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I've never really been a fan of violence. I'm more into the characters and their journey and those kinds of movies don't really allow for that. It's a different focus.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

I am a director because I believe in my own impulses and my own point of view, and that belief encourages me to tell stories that will move, provoke, and change people. But I became a director because I wanted to be a part of the world.

For me, digital is just another avenue. It doesn't mean that it has to be poor quality or poor content. But, you still run into the same struggles. You can't have full-on language, violence or sexual situations. You can't run rampant with the fact that it's digital. You can't do anything you want. You still have a responsibility to tell a story first, and show what the character is going through first, and then maybe you have a little bit of lee-way to show a more real side of life.

I really feel our job as actors is to find a human experience in the character. So, for me, genre comes second; it's about script and the emotional journey of that character. Genre definitely has an impact, but it has more of an impact on the way the character is expressed. We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.

GOOD AS NEW was born out of the idea of writing a play where the stakes were high and the collisions were of a verbal nature. Also I wanted to write a play where people were smarter than I was, and more alive than I feel normally. I became interested in the idea of characters who would surprise me. I guess one could argue that nothing comes out of you that wasn't within you to begin with, but maybe there are ways to trick yourself into becoming more an observer or an advocate for the characters.