Penelope Spheeris Quotes

Journalists in newspapers and in many magazines are not permitted to be subjective and tell their readers what they think. Journalists have got to follow a very strict formulaic line, and here we come, these non-fiction writers, these former journalists who are using all the techniques that journalists are pretty much not allowed to use.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

If I sing "you broke my heart, you left me flat," everyone knows exactly what that means - they know the story. But if I sing a line that's plaintive or wailing, people can experience their own set of emotions and their own story. Each of us might give that phrase a different meaning. It's open to interpretation, and one song becomes a thousand songs. I love that.

When we try to describe the truth with words, we distort it and it's no longer truth--it's our story. The story may be true for us, but that doesn't mean it's true for anyone else.

I never saw any good that came of telling truth.

What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word 'quality' cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not.

It is very difficult to tell the truth.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else.

It's very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television.

I really like when critics reveal their subjectivity and their humanity. I prefer it when people say nice things, but if they say not-nice things or things that are critical, I'm open to it and I accept it. I mean, I have to live with it. But I do think there's a dishonesty in not acknowledging that you're a person with an opinion. I think it's almost like a power grab.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Love is at once the most creative and yet simultaneously destructive force in the world, and thus, in our lives. And I don't mean the Hallmark sentimental type of love, although that is part of it. But a deeper obligation that we have to each other: the obligation to reflect our humanness at each other, to reflect back the things others show us and we, them.

The moment I am aware that I am aware, I am not aware. Awareness means the observer is not.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.

Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk - depends where the light hits.

Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.

Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of the nature of those notions

Why did adults have to be so thick? They always say “tell the truth,” and when you do, they don’t believe you. What’s the point?

Real health has to happen somewhere inside you, in your subjectivity, in your consciousness, because consciousness knows no birth, no death. It is eternal. To be healthy in consciousness means: first, to be awake; second, to be harmonious; third, to be ecstatic; and fourth, to be compassionate.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.