Minnie Maddern Fiske Quotes

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.

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.

I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

Positive characterizations are complex characterizations. That's all we need to know. They shouldn't be saccharine. They shouldn't feel like medicine.

I like games that are complex - the deeper you get into the game, the more there is to learn.

It's good for me to pull away from something that is just done for effect, which was basically Sue White in 'Green Wing.' In that, it was very much: if in trouble, gurn, or fall down. There was no character background to Sue. You didn't know who she was. She didn't have any toehold in any kind of reality.

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

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

Touring Seoul is like an onion that you keep peeling away layer after layer.

The excitement of theatre is palpable but the frustrations, and the complete absence of a definitive evening - the play as text means practically nothing in a way - , there's no particular performance that is definitive in the way a novel is a solid object you hold in your hands and here it is. You can't say that about a play. If the novel gives us a sense of throbbing consciousness, theater is pure soul, beautiful and elusive.

I experience each moment like baklava: rich in this layer, and this layer, and this layer.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

This is a movie version of the play [All the Way]and when Bryan [Cranston] was on stage the bigness of the man was played to the back of the house. When we turned the cameras on that, it changed a bit with close-ups, but we got just as much power in that beautiful intimacy.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

Nothing beautiful can be summarized.

Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.

I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is.

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.

When actresses play actresses, or actors play actors, they have to find another level.

Amos Oz is one of the finest novelists of this entire period. MY MICHAEL is a beautiful work of great depth and in some indescribable way lingers in the mind as a lyric song to his country's people as much as a moving love story.

What I like about acting is that you have to be super, super present in the moment. That's not something that comes to me naturally. But if you take the long view on anything, nothing can really affect you or knock you down. It's like, we're here for a blink, we're just the human experiment, one of many experiments going on in the universe, and it's interesting, it's beautiful by fits and starts, but I can't take it that personally. I'm just one of billions of people attempting.

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits.

With stage, you feel completely like you're just in a bubble. I love not being able to see anything. I love coming out and I can't see anything because the lights are so bright and it's pitch black. That's ideal for me, that's when I have the best time.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that theater excels over film and TV in its ability to let people play with poetry.