Dave Rowntree Quotes

Characters who don't suffer have no interest to me.

If you have a character who wins all the time - well, if you have a character that loses and wins, it makes him more alive. Bugs Bunny, for example, didn't always win.

When we read stories of heroes, we identify with them. We take the journey with them. We see how the obstacles almost overcome them. We see how they grow as human beings or gain qualities or show great qualities of strength and courage and with them, we grow in some small way.

We're always attracted to characters who are people we could identify with and yet are put through incredibly tortured or difficult circumstances - the idea being that you don't really know who you are until you've been tested or suffered in some way.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'

Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.

I have a thing for working with wounded characters.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Signs of fatigue soon manifested themselves more and more strongly, and slowly the men dropped out one by one, from sheer exhaustion. No murmur of complaint, however, would be heard.

I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.

You need to suffer to be interesting.

Every calamity is to be overcome by endurance.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

I think there's something about a character facing the huge problems and challenges of the contemporary world and meeting them with - head on with courage, allowing for darkness and mistake, but ultimately always moral. That's incredibly, incredibly inspiring, and that's honestly what I think.

I think there's this idea that the depth of an actor's performance is built on tough times or horrible events or isolation, but I never found that. I figured that my imagination coupled with the story can get me anywhere.

Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.

I have some great stories. But I am also very human, and I suffered an awful lot.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.

Good TV is not about people being happy; it's drama.

I'm no stranger to pain. It's what made me.

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.