Michael Schur Quotes

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

I'm an emotional person. I chose films based on emotions.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.

I consider those actors who amaze me are somehow less attractive to me than those actors who move me.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

It's the emotion of it that hits me, more than anything technical.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

I may make you angry or make you feel sorry for me, but in the end, you appreciate my show because it's not one-dimensional.

Because sometimes listening to something will connect to a feeling, it will allow you to emote subconsciously, and you don't even understand why you're in it.

Emotion will always win over coolness and cleverness. It's when a scene works emotionally and it's cool and clever, then it's great. That's what you want.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

The job of the art is to really convey and support that empathetic response. I always try to find where the character is mushy, and then bring that to the forefront.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

You have to be able to sustain life. So moments are going to be lighter, but moments are also going to be heavier. I think just the understanding that life goes in a million different directions, and hopefully, if you find excitement by what these characters are experiencing and what they're living through, and you're impacted by them as human beings, then that's the sustainability of the show [This is Us].

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

When you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.

The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.