Courtney A. Kemp Quotes

There are movies where we are interested in seeing people's lives without agreeing with what they're doing.

In order to make characters real - no matter what the character is doing - you have to see yourself as capable of having done that.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

My hope is that each of the villains I write will have his or her own motivation that readers can understand, whether they agree or disagree.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I think for really good-hearted people, that idea of putting yourself in the shoes of a monster to figure out why they acted that way, that's a really frightening idea.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

I like telling stories of imperfect people because most people are imperfect.

As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

Maybe it's because I'm a little naive, but I do like to think that there aren't really very many truly bad people in the world. I think that everybody has their reasons for what they do, and if you really look through their eyes, you could probably understand them.

My characters make incomprehensible decisions until you stand in their shoes. Then it makes more sense. Life is very rarely black and white, and most people are trying to do their best. I try not to judge.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

You've got to understand what makes the character human.

You don't play villains like they are villains. You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

I've never disliked a character I've played. I've always tried to find the humanity and the reasons for what he does.

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.