Howard Barker Quotes

If I see a baby, I don't feel anything. It's like Theresa May walking past a homeless person.

Men's hearts are cold. They are indifferent.

Nothing precludes sympathy so much as a perfect indifference to it

The proud, the cold untroubled heart of stone, that never mused on sorrow but its own.

I don't understand why people really get upset about something that doesn't affect them at all.

I'm just looking for touching characters.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

In Hollywood, they don't care about hurting anyone's feelings.

I don't really get scared. Want to know what else i don't feel?" PITY

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

Nobody helps anybody.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

Most of my songs are about insensitivity of some kind.

Don't tell your problems to people: eighty percent don't care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

Whenever people say they didn't like the main character of a book, they mean they didn't like the book. The main character has to be a friend? I don't get that.

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

It is selfish to concern oneself with tragedies.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

Tolerance is only another name for indifference.

Those whom we can love, we can hate; to others we are indifferent.

I'm realizing that a lot of people don't really care what happens to other people as long as it doesn't affect them.