John Malkovich Quotes

Sometimes it's hard to tell where your instincts start and your baggage stops.

Whatever we refuse to recognize about ourselves has a way of rearing its head and making itself known when we least expect it.

If we knew more about psychology, we would be better equipped to deal with other people's psychological damage which they might project onto us.

Learning about the way people process information and their emotions is hugely helpful to my work.

Why has everything got to be about feelings these days? In the old days, no one knew what anyone was feeling and, what's more, they weren't expected to.

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

I'm somebody who's super into psychology and analysis and the human psyche and the human experience.

Over the years, I just started paying a lot more attention not to whether I was right or wrong, but just to how I make people feel.

Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.

As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.

About what we neither know nor feel precisely while awake-whether we have a good or a bad conscience toward a certain person-our dreams instruct us fully and unambiguously.

I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.

When you are in relationship with people, in a thousand and one ways you are provoked, challenged, seduced. Again and again you come to know your pitfalls, your limitations, your anger, your lust, your possessiveness, your jealousy, your sadness, your happiness all moods come and go, you are constantly in a turmoil. But this is the only way to know who you are.

We can use the romantic relationship as a microcosmic example. Until you really understand the other person and where they're coming from and you understand yourself and how you contribute to things, you can never make that relationship better. And I think sometimes people don't understand how much these things are related.

I think that when somebody tells you something of value, a lot of the time there's this thing that happens, and I don't know if you find it, where they go exactly for the word or the moment or the thing that you were hoping they wouldn't notice, or inside didn't feel 100 percent secure about. If they point it out, then that really sends you the message of, "Okay, I was trying to override my own instincts about it, and I guess I shouldn't."

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves. In the modern world, the quality of life is the quality of communication.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

When I'm starting to feel, "How many more people are there?" I go slower. I ask questions, and that person engaging with me gives me energy.

Your prospective employer, or the person you have a crush on, or the person you want to talk to. You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.

Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we're not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

Always having to have the last word is a bad trait. Pisses people off.