Paula Hawkins Quotes

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

An actor's job is to embrace emotions and situations that in real life we spend all of our time running away from.

And I don't believe that melodramatic feelings are laughable - they should be taken absolutely seriously.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.

I think the best dramatic actors know how to tap into their character's humor.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

When I see an emotion being enacted by a great actor, I always feel I can never do that.

I sort of thought acting was just about arranging your face into emotions. I didn't realise it was about actually allowing yourself to feel the feelings, then letting your face follow. That was a big learning curve.

I have fun doing lighter roles, as I don't have to do anything against my emotions.

Feeling and reacting has more impact than just trying to emote what your character's saying.

I've been in scenarios as an actor where you have to manufacture an emotion that's not really there, but it wasn't hard with Halle because she's a great person and very beautiful, so it ain't a tough job at the end of the day.

I think the emotional toolbox I have is healthy for an actor, as far as the intensity of emotions go. It's other things I have to hone. I can swim in that comfortably.

The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.

I can't tell you about acting. You can develop all the skills, voice, gesture, movement, you can develop by exercise and practice but finally fundamentally it's mining from yourself, from your own personality, from what you know. If you can't know it you can have a good guess by people you know or books you've read.

Laughter is more serious than tears.

I don't get a chance to cry that often on film, so I was hoping that talent would come my way, that day. I cheated, I guess, when I just started looking at my technology device - my iPhone - to look at pictures of my kids, before I did the scene where I had to cry. That was a good trick that I found.

Eyes which have lost their tears have lost their most beautiful, their most glorious treasure.

Sometimes I think as an artist you tend to go toward the heartbreak and the sadness because those are the deepest and heaviest emotions you can pull out as an entertainer and as a singer.

I never utter my real feelings about anything. My lighter, superficial side will always be too quick for the deeper side of me, and that's why it always wins.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

I think we're past the time in history where you have to come out and say, "I'm happy all the time! I'm a joker! I'm a crazy man!" I think people understand that I can turn that switch on but that I'm also a sensitive, normal human being with feelings and I know how to express those too.

But how to do feelings? All very well to write "She felt sad", or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things.

Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere.