Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

This is not what it is like to be you, I realized as a few of your magnificent clouds flew over the rooftop. It is just me thinking about being you. And before I headed back down the hill, I walked in a circle around your house, making an invisible line which you would have to cross before dark.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

The best quality about Kobe Bryant? You want me to be honest? I don't know. I'll tell you why. I open my arms to everybody. But he never stepped forward for the embrace. So I never really got to know him. I don't know anything about him, and it's kinda sad.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

I can't consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

I want books to give me insight into the way people's brains work and hearts work, and that's what engages me.

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox somehow. I have to care, I have to have skin in the game.

Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.

To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.

Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

You have to put yourself in my shoes as a person who believes in radical truth and in being radically transparent, not in seeing things through somebody else's eyes.

It is difficult to judge one's contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

I might live miles away from you, but I do understand you issues.

Only poetry can measure the distance between ourselves and the Other.

To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

But the truth is that no person ever understands another, from beginning to end of life, there is no truth that can be known, only the story we imagine to be true, the story they really believe to be true about themselves; and all of them lies.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

Looking into another person's eyes for an extended period of time proved to be a powerful thing. And if you don't believe me, try it yourself.

Somehow I had come to believe that because a person is in need, they are candidates for sympathy, not just charity. It was not that I wanted to buy her groceries, the government was already doing that. I wanted to buy her dignity. And yet, by judging her, I was the one taking her dignity away.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

When I started to be published I thought about Margaret Bourke-White and the whole journalistic approach to things. I believed I was supposed to catch life going by me - that I wasn't to alter it or tamper with it - that I was just to watch what was going on and report it as best I could. This shoot with John was different. I got involved, and I realized that you can't help but be touched by what goes on in front of you. I no longer believe that there is such a thing as objectivity.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

How can you expect me to believe that?""whether you believe it or not does not change the nature of truth

This little expression, 'It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere,' is a monstrous lie.

I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much.