James Russell Lowell Quotes

I love the fact that people can relate to what I'm saying, even if it's not for the same subject I was writing about. That is the power of real music and real expression.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

We're not one thing, as human beings, so any character that is written uni-dimensional, that's just a shallow character with shallow writing and shallow acting.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

It's more like can I build a group of characters and can I tell some universal truths that feel real and aren't formulaic in the spirit of filmmakers gone by who've told American stories that were personal and universal as well.

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

With each character in a movie, I'm looking for a human being. I'm looking for a person. And to me, I'm looking for a person that's full of strengths and weaknesses, a person that's full of successes and failures, a person that's full of joy and sorrow. I'm interested in people that are human beings that are alive.

We keep our music simple, no big gimmicks. We tell stories people can relate to, not hard to understand.

Love stories should be relatable.

I want to tell stories that are true and that resonate and move people, that highlight both the tremendous beauty and ugliness available in the human experience.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

'The Muppet Show' spoke to me at 5, and it speaks to me in my late 30s in the same way.

I think what happens with a lot of writing and art is that specificity ends up being relatable while universality becomes vague.

What I have that's special in my music is substance. It's music that people can really relate to. I know I'm gonna rap something that somebody has already been through in their life, something that they will understand.

People want things that address their everyday reality, and that goes for stuff that isn't political - with singer-songwriter music, people want things that touch them.

I think unintentionally I gravitate towards concepts and topics that hit home or are something real we can all relate to.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

I think people enjoy "The Lobster" because people respond to original things, but I think they only respond to original things if they connect to some truths within us.

I think a great song appeals to older and younger people and it makes you think. It's also honest, and it also doesn't hurt if it's fun to sing along to.

A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.