Evelyn Waugh Quotes

I'm interested in stories and the dark side of peoples' minds.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

People tend not to dwell on drama.

I think that people are fascinated with the stories, with human nature and the dark turns it can take.

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor. Whatever people are struggling with, the struggle is often where the drama is.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.

Another good thing about gossip is that it is within everybody's reach, And it is much more interesting than any other form of speech.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.

If lyrics make people do things, how come we don't love each other?

The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

When you think about justifiable anger in one's personal life, we look at those scenarios in everyday life and through our story with a superhero, we heighten them.

It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in it. There's no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody's got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it.

I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it's graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is. It's a wonderful thing.

But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . .

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

If something produces an undue amount of pleasure or undue amount of displeasure, it's going to be judged differently and it's going to be introduced in your narrative with a different size, with a different development. So that is the next element to superimpose on the sequencing element. And in fact, that element is so powerful that very often it can trump the sequencing event, that the sequencing aspect.

You can't tell a good story without conflict - the story can't be beautiful or meaningful. We're taught to run from conflict, and it's robbing us of some really good stories.

I'm inspired by watching and listening to people. For example, my first novel, The Scale, came to life after I overheard two women discussing their struggle with their weight at the gym.

I'm such a fan of Deadwood. I love the characters in that. They're such wonderful characters. I'm a fan of The Wire. Those are all heavily character-based shows.

I can get on with wild beasts first-rate; but men rile me awfully.