James Gleick Quotes

Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.

You learn stuff from every character you play about the human condition that can be quite enlightening.

What better book can there be than the book of humanity.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of course, because we usually find ourselves loving or pitying almost all of those people. And it’s impossible to despise someone you honestly pity, and to shun someone you truly love.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

One of the reasons I took up acting was to learn to be more human, to get in touch with human emotions.

The true artform is being a human being.

Experience is how life catches up with us and teaches us to love and forgive each other.

Read not books alone, but men, and amongst them chiefly thyself.

I find human behavior really interesting. I think that's ultimately what being an actor is. You explore what it means to be human.

The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and ... and earns. It's a thing he can't have when he's very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it's truly part of him as long as he lives.

Are You Seeing Me? is written powerfully with both the heart and the head, and neither gives an inch. It's funny, moving and hugely insightful. Darren Groth puts the reader into the heads of Perry and Justine in a way that feels so true and so revealing that I think I've come away with a greater capacity for empathy. I didn't know a book could do that. We all need to spend some time inside this story.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

Well, it's my age group, anywhere from, I'd say 30 to 70. The biggest comment I get about the book is how honest it is and that people can relate to my circumstances going across the line. Anybody could learn and deal with this book from reading it.

In the beginning of the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Edward is more enamored of himself than he is of anybody else. He's a very fine rabbit; he's been constructed incredibly well, and he has a wardrobe of amazing clothing. He's arrogant, and he doesn't care whether Abilene loves him or not. As the journey progresses, as he gets passed from hand to hand, he learns what it means to love. He gets more and more bedraggled, and his clothing is lost; yet he becomes finer in soul and heart than he was at the beginning of the journey.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.

Many artists use their own lives as a kind of case study to examine what it's like to be human.

I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people.

I think almost everything in life is life-experience, personality-driven.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

I try to learn on each project, try to really feel what the characters are feeling.