Peter Matthiessen Quotes

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I figured out 'The Sixth Sense' in the first 10 minutes. I still found the movie touching.

Literature speaks with everyone individually - it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return other than that we think and feel.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

I'm an emotional person. I chose films based on emotions.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

What does the brain matter compared with the heart?

My guys are morally weak, and they reach toward a tenuous knowledge of self-sacrifice, and sometimes it's too late. I find that moving. It's not a life I'd want to live. But, then, I'm not completely my books.

I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.

Music and movie scripts are books. You want to be literally moved and that's the sort of things I look for.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

What use having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people.

Love is in all of the books, and that's the connective tissue between them. There's a lot of hope in me; I can feel it. These stories are balls of light for me.

The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.

Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.