Michael Eklund Quotes

I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

One is made by all the things around one. There are many things that have made one. For a writer to go around looking for things that have made him is asking for trouble. It's like giving a character to yourself. Can't do it. Can't do it. These things are just there. Is that enough?

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

As a novelist, I feel lucky that I can traffic in nuance. I'm more interested in looking at how things change over time, at how people try and sometimes fail to make meaning out of their lives.

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.

I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes.

A good writer - and I think it's this way with actors too - even if you have two lines, you have to do the same complete work as if you're number one on the call sheet. If you get in an elevator and somebody gets on, rides two floors and gets off, that person has a reality that goes back to when they were born. They have memories, they have people, they have a life. They are doing something right now that the camera is on them in their space. We live in our own close-up all the time.

A good movie humanizes people.

My name is Daniel, and this is the first volume of my life story, which, hopefully, will be a very long and distinguished one. Who should you read it? Very good question. Maybe because this is your planet, and you have a right to know what's actually happening on it.

My favorite stories are human, so I'm always looking for...

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

Everyone has a story.

One of the nice things about acting is that it allows you to open up to the other people within you.

Each person's life is a story that is telling itself in the living.

In my new book, 'Binge,' I share essays about everything I've never told my viewers - touching on the best and worst days of my life, some hilarious, some embarrassing, but all extremely personal.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

Everybody has their own story; everybody has their own journey.

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

The characters I write about are very internal.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

It's not that I'm necessarily looking for things that are so dark and emotional. But if I see something where the character goes through enormous change, it's very appealing to play all those levels, and that is probably going to involve some dark moments.

I think you see in people's eyes what they've been through. Anything in their lives shows up in their eyes.

You know, the point of a novel - or to me, the point of a novel, the gift of a novel is to go really deeply inside people's lives and inside their personal experiences.

I am so enriched because so much has happened in my life. The way I can express myself is because of the life I have led. It's only when you experience life can you emote it.