Chang-Rae Lee Quotes

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

Every single person has a story that will break your heart. And if you're paying attention, many people... have a story that will bring you to your knees. Nobody rides for free.

I don't watch like Sci-fi or things like that, I'm always more like real life is so endlessly fascinating to me.

Life is so interesting... just every day life. I remember someone once saying: "Drama is real life with the boring bits taken out."

There are real people behind the [Bible] stories.

We're all real people with moments of intense honesty and pathos and humanity. We all experience that, whether you're comedic or not.

True fighters dare face the sorrows of humanity, and look unflinchingly at bloodshed. What sorrow and joy are theirs! But the Creator's common device for ordinary people is to let the passage of time wash away old traces leaving only pale-red bloodstains and a vague pain; and he lets men live on ignobly and amid these, to keep this quasi-human world going.

I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.

Traveling really inspires me, seeing other cities and going on tour. If you've got fans online, it's hard to remember those people are real people.

I never base characters on real people - you can get into so much trouble that way!

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people's lives.

Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Research is what drives me. When I get a script, I go to the real world and touch the real people.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

Hey show some respect. They’re real people with names. Carla and Krissy” He frowned. “Or was it Missy?

A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen-and then in bed, of course.

I think people relate to the music because I have a sense of empathy, and I think I have a good understanding about relationships, and I talk about them in a real, honest way

Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual. In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only about five hundred real people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.

I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.

We're not the only people that have had to suffer, there have always been people that've had to.

This isn't a Christmas special! This is my life. In the real world, miracles and goodness just don't happen.