Josh Brolin Quotes

Books are my very favorite gift to give. If you give a book to someone and they really respond to it, you feel you've actually changed their life in some way.

My approach to selecting a film is very simple - it should touch my heart.

Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.

I love what movies and television and all that kind of stuff has done to me through the years. I love that it can bring up all these different emotions in me - whether it's anger or happiness or sadness...whatever it may be.

I stopped reading music reviews because it's somebody having a knee-jerk reaction to a song. I realized that that's not the definitive interpretation. It won't last long. It's a fleeting thing. What matters are people's relationships with these things over time and sometimes songs just take a really long time to reveal their true identity.

I feel I should try to reveal. When you hit it right, you produce an emotional response in the listener that can be cathartic. When you're wrong, you're soppy, sentimental.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.

I get letters from people about my work. The thing that pleases me most is that my work touches their feelings. In fact, they don't talk about the paintings. They end up telling me the story of their life or how their father died.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

The thought of a man being the murderer of his own daughter in the Twin Peaks was anathema to me. At the time, I had a 2-year-old daughter of my own, and that possibility really turned me off. I was praying that I wouldn't be the one.

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.

So it's nice to know that Rita had that impact, and it was nice to end a character on a high note like that. But, again, in the moment... I always say, nobody was more devastated than me [from Rita's death in Dexter]!

The fact that I do place music at the end of my films is not to accentuate the emotion. It serves an opposite purpose which is to remove them from the emotional space and allow them to enter a space of thinking, because I believe that when the audience is watching the film they're watching it with their feelings.

Being remembered, and remembered so kindly, touched him more than he would have thought possible.

Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys or moral questions that might make you walk away and re-evaluate how you felt about... whatever. Now we're walking out of the cinema really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk had a fight with a robot.

There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

I just understand... I mean this may sound kind of bigheaded, bullheaded, or cumbersome, but when people say they've had a really deep experience with the record, like it caused a divorce or it like...I've gotten all these stories.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.

The movie itself was very interesting, but I didn't think it was very good because I didn't really feel different when it was over.

It was probably 10 at night when I started to read Donnie Darko. I get in bed and read the first page, and I go, "Hmmm. That's interesting." Second page, "Wow." By the fourth page, my heart started to beat, and I knew. It makes me cry, because I knew I had found a classic film. You just know when you get certain material.

I think everybody reacts to entertainment with a different kind of visceral way, probably mostly based on their own personal experiences.

I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life.

In the finished article, the only thing that is important is whether it moves you or not. There is nothing else that is important at all.