John Mason Brown Quotes

My first wife was a theater person.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

I did a lot of theater as a kid because I had a bunch of friends who did it.

There's no place more theatrical than history.

Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.

An important part of building a new culture was allowing people to complain about their past. At first, the more they complained, the worse the past would seem. But by venting, people could start to resolve the past. By bitching and bitching and bitching, they could exhaust the drama of their own horror stories. Grow bored. Only then could they accept a new story for their lives. Move forward.

[Theater] has always been a big focus. I have been away from it for the past few years. I want to get back to it!

Asking about acting to me is like asking about junior high.

I want to play the regular guy who's had a bit of a jaded past or a bit of a tortured soul because I think they're interesting.

I've done my "mind over matter" movies, and I think probably that people aren't really interested in seeing me do that anymore. I think I'm kind of past my prime to do dramatic films. I think it'd become kind of like almost a pathetic cry out to be recognized as a serious drama actor.

There's a big difference between "not caring" or being "nihilistic" about a topic and simply not being enrolled by the drama presented by other people. Just because my characters choose not to react in standard, socially-appropriate ways - that does not mean they don't care. They just reject ordinary dramas.

Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.

...photographs are facts, but not necessarily true... The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.

In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.

Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.

Not One Tiny Slice of that Guilt will Do Anything to Change a Single Thing in the Past

Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.

Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.

Each person with his or her history of being accepted or rejected, with his or her past history of inner pain and difficulties in relationships, is different. But in each one there is a yearning for communion and belonging, but at the same time a fear of it. Love is what we most want, yet it is what we fear the most.

We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.

I thought if I could do stand-up comedy well enough, I could parlay it back into films - like Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen did. They merged principles of comedy and drama together, and that's what my first film really was, a stab at that kind of comedy.

To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

The light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.