Claude Chabrol Quotes

Laughter is a strange response. I mean, what is it? It's a spasm of some kind! Is that always joy? It's very often discomfort. It's some sort of explosive reaction. It's very complex.

At the end of the day, Mitt Romney and Ann Romney are two fine people.

Some people are jerks, and some people aren't.

It is the men who makes a city.

The ultimate fate of a people does not depend so much on organization as on the worth and power of individual men.

The productivity of social cooperation surpasses in every respect the sum total of the production of isolated individuals.

My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.

I have always been more interested in persons than in people.

Creation occurs when ideas and individuals collide and collude.

When you're training as an actor, a lot of the big work you're learning is to treat fictional characters like real people. You don't have the problem of discovering a backstory with real people, but there's always a mystery which is common to both fictional and factual characters. They are never quite the person you think they are.

Writer's block to me is where you stop because you're afraid to go forward because you're not sure of what really should be happening next and you think, my gosh, if I choose this... you've got a hundred millions of avenues you could possibly go down but it's all an assess of characters.

Certain flaws are necessary for the whole. It would seem strange if old friends lacked certain quirks.

You do not have to force yourself to do anything at all. There is a continual exchange, a continual dance. It is similar to the sun shining and plants growing. The sun has no desire to create the vegetation; plants simply react to sunlight and the situation develops naturally.

I'm a very big believer in collaboration and teamwork.

[We need] someone bold, to put himself at the head of the disaffected and rally them against the oppressor. Some great character who could captivate the people... someone wise who could direct the actions of an unbridled and floating multitude.

You're trying to play someone [Edward Cullen] who's seen by a lot of people as being this perfect thing, but what is that? That doesn't really mean anything. You're trying to play an archetype on one hand and then a character on the other, so I felt insanely frustrated right up until the last shot, and then it ended.

Style for me is some one who figures out who they are. What works on them. What they feel good in and develops that. Develops their character. And the outer expression of their character is what is style.

Rich men are neither better nor worse than all other humans. They contribute to greatness or mediocrity, strength of character or weakness in exactly the same proportion as persons in all other walks of life do.

Only strong natures can really be sweet ones; those that seem sweet are in general only weak, and may easily turn sour.

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable. In some ways, we have similarities, but in other ways, we're completely different. It's hard to say because I'm an actor living in a world where we're all pretty privileged, and this guy is fighting for his life. They're very different circumstances. Within those circumstances, there are probably ways that we react to certain situations that are similar.

An audience gets to hang onto the characters for the rest of their lives if they want. I think it's great that the fans do that. It's just not too practical for a man like myself because I have to move on.

Events are never absolute, their outcome depends entirely upon the individual. Misfortune is a stepping stone for a genius, a piscina for a Christian, a treasure for a man of parts, and an abyss for a weakling.

I feel my fuller-bodied characters are all in the independent films I do, and in the studio productions, I have to work harder to dimensionalize the characters. And that's certainly part of the job description of an actor - that's what you're supposed to do - but you have to work harder at it in the characters that I've encountered in studio films.

An important advance in the life of a people is the transformation of the religion of fear into the moral religion. But one must avoid the prejudice that regards the religions of primitive peoples as pure fear religions and those of the civilized races as pure moral religions. All are mixed forms, though the moral element predominates in the higher levels of social life. Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of the idea of God.

If I collaborate with people, ideas...they take interesting turns and twists, and I'm excited for that and that process and excited to see what we come up with.