Andrew Sean Greer Quotes

There's no way to know exactly what someone's dealing with, no matter how open you are. You're just never going to know everything.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

We cannot possibly imagine the variety of contradictions in every heart.

If there is a reason I'm able to make unsympathetic characters human, it's because it's my desire to find what drives the unsympathetic behavior. Almost always at the bottom of it is some deep insecurity. Putting your finger on what each individual's particular insecurity is goes a long way to fleshing that person out.

You never know what's going on in someone's life. You never know what's really going on behind what they present.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

Just because you don't know if other people are experiencing the same thing as you are, it doesn't mean that it's not happening. Everybody doesn't necessarily share everything. Just know that what you're going through, other people are going through it, too.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

I cannot draw a human figure if I don't know the order of his bones, muscles or tendons. Same is that I cannot draw a human face if I don't know what's going on his mind and heart. In order to paint life one must understand not only anatomy, but what people feel and think about the world they live in. The painter who knows his own craft and nothing else will turn out to be a very superficial artist.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

If your heart was as big as your mouth you'd be real.

I'm more into kind of real stories, psychological movies.

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too

Human beings have a bunch of different dimensions, so even if you're playing someone who you think maybe the audience might not like, might not be going for, you still have to give them the dimensions to make them a real human, otherwise there's no point.

My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.

Amid my list of blessings infinite, stands this the foremost, "that my heart has bled."

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

I can't even tell you what else I imagined. I can only humiliate myself to such a degree; at a certain point it becomes humorous, and this story is not meant to be humorous. This story is meant to winch your ribs open and tamper with your heart. This story is meant to make you realize that your chances of happiness in this world are terribly slim if you lack a fine imagination.

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed

The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.