Walter de La Mare Quotes

There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

Simple people... are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them.

I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.

People aren't universally heroic.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.

I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people.

I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.

I can't write about rich people having relationship problems and breaking up in New York. I don't know that world of Terrence McNally. I knew I had to write people who talk the way I talk. And they talked very different than Terrence McNally.

Walking around sometimes, I would love to just be able to watch people, see how they act. Sometimes I would love to be invisible.

The world's made up of individuals who don't want to be heroes.

I always feel like people in general are much weirder and insane than anybody really wants to admit. How dare somebody watch anything and go, 'That's not real!' Go on the subway. For five minutes.

I think that's what distinguishes Schmidt, really. In the movies now, so much of what is appealing to an audience is the dramatic or has to do with science fiction, and Schmidt is simply human. There's no melodrama; there's no device, It's just about a human being.

It's great to see that celebrities can be just like us - that they too have their highs and lows, that they don't always wake up looking their best, that they have bad habits and annoying traits.

From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.

TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.

A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.

It's the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It's the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that's why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It's at the heart of how to live a great life.

Whenever I write, I write what I find to be the way people are. I never use any symbolism at all, but if you write as true to life as you possibly can, people will see symbolism. They'll all see different symbolism, but they're apt to because you can see it in life.

Am I perfect? Not at all. I'm just like everybody else.

I wouldn't mind working in restaurants again because you build up a relationship with the customers. I'm really inspired by the mundane - it's often the most ordinary-looking people who have the best stories - and you can watch diners and study their idiosyncrasies without them being aware of it.

I'm just trying to make movies simply about life. Naturally, when I'm doing that, horror, violence, and all those kinds of things get mixed in. All those things happen in reality.

We write stories about common people and common things. That's what Skynyrd always is about - the real working class of America.