Tennessee Williams Quotes

For me, storytelling is all about how we learn about each other. I'm so curious about people, what makes them tick, why they are who they are, and how we all relate to each other, despite the fact that we may not think that we do.

If you're a person and care about other people - I don't think I have any sort of special understanding or anything, I think any feeling person would experience similar things if given the same opportunities to see the things I've been lucky enough to see and meet the people I've been lucky enough to meet.

For me, I think it's such an important thing to hear other people's stories, because you do find ways that either you can learn something from them, or you can identify with something that they've gone through. You realize that maybe what you're going through in life isn't just specific to you, that somebody else understands it, or you talk to someone and all of sudden you see something in a completely different way because of what they've said to you or shared with you.

It's a slight stretch of the imagination but most people are alike in most ways so I've never had any trouble identifying with the character that I'm playing.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

I think more than anything, people just want to be understood.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

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.

Some people think that without that spark of empathy we would do nothing, but that's just flat-out wrong. You could feel compassion for somebody without the spark of empathy.

Everyone is always going through tough things, the irony in it is that everyone thinks what they're going through is just as hard as what you are. Life isn't about surviving this, it's about understanding this.

That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.

Practice loving people. It is true that this requires effort and continued practice, for some are not very lovable, or so it seems - with emphasis on seems. Every person has lovable qualities when you really learn to know him.

A good movie humanizes people.

Sometimes you look out the window and you look at all the windows, and think inside very single one of them is somebody with some huge, weird, terrible problem, some great jokes.

I don't really care if people like a character ornot; I think in life we don't always like everybody. But you haveto be able to understand them.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Although my stories are all very different on the surface, I like to write stories about characters struggling with big problems. I'm always reminded, no matter how different from me one of my characters is from me on the surface, how we're all pretty much the same underneath.

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.

I tell stories about people audiences might think they have nothing in common with, then they emotionally connect with them and find they're not different at all.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

I always felt myself to be an unlucky person like Donald, who is a victim of so many circumstances. But there isn't a person in the United States who couldn't identify with him. He is everything, he is everybody; he makes the same mistakes that we all make.

Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.

There are so many people in the world with so many different perspectives. But ultimately, at the heart of it, they're people.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.