Colum McCann Quotes

I'm someone who likes to explore the complexities in people.

People say I make strange choices, but they're not strange for me. My sickness is that I'm fascinated by human behavior, by what's underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

I think you have to see the high highs and the low lows to get to the core of what makes us tick as people.

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.

I am very interest in the human condition. That is what I love about acting. I like studying different people and their psychosis. I like discovering what makes them tick. I always find that with any character I play. I need to find out what makes them tick.

My primary interest has always been about exploring the human psyche and humanity.

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.

People are complex. I'm just showing my complexity.

I think if you write about human relationships, you're always exploring the psyche and the soul. I don't separate certain - perhaps more extreme - things that people do from others.

All those songs reflect all the people that live within me.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

I think people have a lot of layers. I know I do in particular.

I'm very interested in what makes people tick; people are so weird and complicated.

I definitely have a lot of different layers inside of me.

Any human being is this wonderful conglomeration of experiences and behaviors, if you like - some of them healthy, some of them not so healthy.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

Ten years of character development affords you a lot. You get a chance to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into a person.

People are more than two-dimensional, and again I think the complexities in life, and in one's makeup, grow as you get older, partly through experience.