Andrew Haigh Quotes

If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and into my pictures and hopefully transmitted to the viewer.

Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

If we have anything kind to say, any tender sentiment to express, we feel a sense of shame.

Our emotions resonate with each other - for better and for worse.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

There's nothing you can't tell to an audience, because they're all people who've had lives. The only thing they don't want to watch is someone who's really angry or out of control.'

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

I gotta do some sad scenes. Why, I never tried to make anybody cry in my life! And I go 'round all the time dolled up in kippie clothes-wear everything but a corset...can't stub my toe in this picture nor anything! Just imagine having to play-act all the time without ever getting hit with anything!

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer.

The kind of sermon which is likely to break the hearer's heart is that which first has broken the preacher's heart, and the sermon which is likely to reach the heart of the hearer is the one which has come straight from the heart of the preacher.

Everytime you see a flood like that on the news you tell yourself: That's it. That's my heart.

I'm often moved by the circumstances around some of my characters, but I don't think I've actually cried watching myself.

Ward has no heart, they say, but I deny it: He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it.

Sympathy is the golden key that unlocks the hearts of others.

Pity swells the tide of love.

One of the great things about drama is that it makes you feel like you're not a crackpot, and that there are other people who think and feel the way you do.

Empathy is forgetting oneself in the joys and sorrows of another, so much so that you actually feel that the joy or sorrow experienced by another is your own joy and sorrow. Empathy involves complete identification with another.