Gerhard Richter Quotes

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.

I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.

However, if you listen to me I think you can hear years of abuse in my voice - both bad abuse and good abuse.

Everybody is not completely traumatised by their life.

Pain leaves a mark, the degree depending on the person and the event.

I learned denial from my mother. I just never confronted things and if anybody did, I just would go crazy.

I was a little bit perturbed by the whole big grief machine that grew out of 9/11. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure about how to go about it.

The great thing about all my siblings is we all agree we had a horrendous childhood. It's not like it doesn't affect us now; it affects us every day, in everything we do.

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

People are constantly not feeling, but numbing themselves, either through medication or playing on their phones. If you start feeling bad, it's like, 'Distract! Distract! Put on Storage Wars!' And I know because I'm guilty of it, too.

There's the occasional script that just hammers you, that you can't shower off.

The doctor told me, 'You have breast cancer.' I heard the cancer part first - it was only later that I heard the breast part. I couldn't believe it.

I'm pretty mad at horror films for ruining my childhood.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

The physical part was one thing. Whatever - I broke my face; that'll heal. The mental aspect was the biggest shock to the system. You just don't know how to experience stuff like that. You don't have any control over it, either. It's just how your body and brain reacts to something like that happening.

People always ask me, 'I don't know how you could watch that, how that affects you,' and I just tell them, 'I went through it in real life, so it's like pilots watching a 'Top Gun' movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,' something like that.

When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.

I'm not desensitized to death.

In life, when what has happened happens to you, you don't digest it.

My story is just my story, and it's not nearly as traumatic as some.