Olivia Colman Quotes

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

When you're watching a movie and find yourself getting emotional, it's because you're bringing something personal to the images. It's the same thing with acting. You're bringing the essence of your core emotional being to that moment.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

In a world where irony reigns, where you have to separate, protect and laugh at anything that is honest or has an emotional charge, I bet for catharsis. I like to invest emotionally in things. And catharsis, when it touches the emotional vein, can open the doors of even those who protect themselves.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

I think anything emotional adds to your acting and singing, no matter what it is that you go through. It will always add to it, never take away.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.'

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

That's my mission: to make you feel something.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.

We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.

That's the difference between even the best video game and what's going on in books. Video games can inspire a reaction, but not the emotions.