Radha Mitchell Quotes

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

When you're writing historical fiction, you have to think a little farther into the situation: what the average social interactions were, what was acceptable behavior. What did people think was fun, what did they find unhappy, and why?

I think doing period piece is easier, because after a certain distance, everybody is equal, I think. The relative contemporary is harder. I think that's the way it is.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mold the social life of mankind.

Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional framework.

History requires us to judge the figures of the past not by our moral standards but by those of the ages in which they lived and worked.

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

In the U.S., women smile more than men. In the U.K., there's no difference between men and women.

There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.

I wonder if it changes the nature of a society for beauty to be so common. Maybe in Vietnam "She has a wonderful personality" really means something. But I couldnt figure out a polite way to ask.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it's done - the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

I admit that the eyes of the intellectually and culturally lively tend to glaze over at the mere mention of sociology, often with ample justification.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

Genes cannot tell us how to catalogue or comprehend human diversity. Environments can, cultures can, geographies can, histories can.