Markus Zusak Quotes

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.

If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.

I think carrying moral baggage is very dangerous for an artist. If you have a duty, it's to be true and not cover up the cracks.

We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

My intention throughout has been to write, to create literature, and to be able to look people in the eye after I'd done it - the people I'd written about.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

We all have dark sides to ourselves, and I want to portray that in a realistic way.

My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of 'Les Miserables,' in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie.

Today, not a numerous, but an active part of the German people are beginning to realize, not that they have been led astray, not that bad times await them, not that the war may end in defeat, but that what is happening is sin and that they are personally responsible for each terrible deed that has been committed - naturally, not in the earthly sense, but as Christians.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

An awful lot of actors shy away from the uglier aspects of the human condition. They want to be liked, which is a cop-out. You've got to go for it.

My goal as an actor was just to be somebody very human. I'm not really interested in playing a character who is particularly cool and everything he does looks great and turns out great.

My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

Play the role as a human being... human beings are three-dimensional.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

In modern life, we hide behind ourselves. In Shakespeare, there's nowhere left to hide. It's life, larger than life, and every actor has to raise their game to get there.

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

Whatever films we make we should be honest in the genre we are making.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.