Toby Stephens Quotes

I get emotionally attached with every film I do, and that stops me from being critical. I can't fight my emotions.

It's hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I'm so close to them.

I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can.

I didn't want to lose my subjectivity and my objectivity about my work.

I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox somehow. I have to care, I have to have skin in the game.

It's very hard to be objective about something you're in, especially when you set it up against things that you experienced as a child.

A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you're just too close to it.

It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,” Tsukiko says. “It is too familiar. Too comfortable.

A man's clarity of judgment is never very good when you're involved, and as you grow older, and as you grow more involved, your clarity of judgement suffers.

Once you attach your personality to a proposition, people start reacting to the personality and stop reacting to the proposition.

I try to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.

I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.

Don't get seduced by your own stuff. Don't get high on your own supply. The hardest thing as a filmmaker is when you're watching a film that you've worked on for several years. You know every frame so intimately that holding lots of the objectivity of a new viewer who has just seen it for the first time is the hardest thing. Every aesthetic decision you make - and you make thousands of them every day, have to - in theory, must be done from you being a blank slate. You almost have to run a program, like a mind wipe, every time you watch the movie.

I think that if you feel imaginatively towards a subject, you really shouldn't do it in a journalistic context, because then you're just fabricating, and that's crazy.

We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.

There is no such thing as an objective interpretation.

Facts do not constitute truth.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.

Anything that I've put my name to and my face to and put my time into, is something that I'm clearly passionate about, or I wouldn't be there.

If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.

Don't be fair, be engaged.

One can be a good critic and a moral observer, but one remains professionally detached as a writer and a filmmaker.