Walker Percy Quotes

Pity a thing often avowed, seldom felt; hatred is a thing often felt, seldom avowed.

The core of the film is usually something very emotional and something that feels really real that you can relate to, it's not like done in a false way. You know a lot of films will treat emotion falsely and you can sense that very quickly.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

With a lot of what we take to be true feelings, especially on pop records, we feel them because they're cleverly crafted. And because the words are written by somebody who knows how to craft words and draw on those things and convey those feelings. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. But it also doesn't mean that it's all just pure primitive emotion spilling out.

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

Love scenes are extremely difficult. You're always within a millimeter of sentimentality and 'yuck.'

I can't pretend that I'm happy or pretend to get emotional when I'm not.

British culture is very cynical sometimes of overt displays of sentimentality, and I think that becomes almost a suspicion of emotion, or a suspicion of someone making a grand statement. It is always easier to be ironic, or 'meta', or coolly postmodern. But I think there is such a thing as authentic sentimentality.

Feelings don't lie.

The man who wishes to bend me with his tale of woe must shed true tears - not tears that have been got ready overnight.

A lot of people hate heroes. I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.

And yet, I do believe there is ultimately meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums. What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, 'This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I’m going to go hide in the garage.'

I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say "I hate you", it's not really hate, you know, it's anger.

In love, anger is always false.

Genuine feelings are never the product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.

If you hate something, you hate it, and if you like something or somebody, you like it, but tell the truth. And most celebrities have that thin veneer that they will not break for you.

When I'm singing a song on stage, I hate hypocrites. If you don't put yourself in that lyric and emote and be what that lyric says that you are, then you're just going through the motions and you're being hypocritical. I just take that same approach with acting. I just take the dialogue and I emote it and become that. I use the same technic.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

I love things that are brave enough to be nakedly about what our lives are actually built of, when you're wild about someone, or you love something, or you're a fool, or you embarrass yourself. And I don't think the answer is cynicism. Cynicism is not the cure for sentimentality. Cynicism is its own form of sentimentality. For example, I tried to watch Breaking Bad. After three episodes, I thought, I don't like this guy. I don't care about him. But you can see why people tell themselves that they think this is real. But real doesn't mean bad.

Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings — the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality — actually exist.

A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

I want feelings to be expressed, to be open, to be natural, not to be looked on as strange. It's not weird if you feel deeply.

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

If you're striving for strong emotion and strong sentiment, and you're authentic with it and honest with it, then you're on the right side of the line. But if you step into sentimentality, there is a false move or a false tone to it.