Susan Wiggs Quotes

It just seems like the most successful, iconic love stories are not so easy or escapist. I think the ones that stay with us and resonate are full of conflict, discord and misunderstandings 'cause that's what makes drama happen or tension even if it's a comedy.

Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me, and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.

For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.

For me, writing is an experience. It's an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions - about love, what does it mean to love? What's beauty? What is true beauty? What does it mean to be insane - crazy?

Love is tested in so many ways. How do I articulate this? Two people are together. There are stakes, strife, struggles, all these things that make us fall for someone, love someone even more, leave someone.

I think there are a lot more relationship scenes in my movies that people tend to overlook. A lot of scenes really feel real and are about the characters.

'Comfort Me with Apples' is a love story, or better, two love stories. And since it deals with a later period in my life, most of the people who appear in it are living.

My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. Yes, it's got hard stuff in it, but so does 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.'

Movies like that aren't about the visual effects and explosions. They're human stories about family, about life, about death.

How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

I wanted to do different movies. I wanted to do deeper movies. More human movies based on human feelings.

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.

There are so many romantic comedies made, but very few dramas or love stories. And with a love story, you have to take time to develop three-dimensional characters.

I think there's always a bit of pain in everything that's ecstatic - relationships and love, they always come with pain.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

A good love story always keeps the pot boiling.

When I started to write 'Crazy Thing Called Love,' I wanted a conflict that would not only bring Billy and Maddy together in terms of proximity and give them a common goal but that would also drive a wedge between them. And nothing fit the bill quite like the arrival of some children.

A romantic novel is an adult fairy story, repeating the recurring symbols and images which can explain life to a woman and satisfy a powerful need within her. The need to love and be loved is vital to all human beings, but especially to women.

I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.

Love is the strongest and most fragile thing we have in life.

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life?

Life is a very emotional experience.