Douglas Conant Quotes

In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants.

It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Thence, I suppose, my natural disposition to make fresh acquaintances, and to break with them so readily, although always for a good reason, and never through mere fickleness.

On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.

I'm always watching people over a short time frame, putting them in an extreme position. Sometimes you don't see the humanity in a person because the time frame is so short and the circumstance so extreme.

But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

What do we know but that we face one another in this place?

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

Play is the establishment and exploration of relationship.

Thinking and feeling that have to do with action in association with others is as much a social mode of behavior as is the most overt cooperative or hostile act.

What I was actually trying to do in my early movies was show how people can meet other people and what they can do and what they can say to each other. That was the whole idea: two people getting acquainted.

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Even the most introverted person alive is constantly hungry for human association

I get off on the interaction with people, and I love the chess of a movie and particularly - not only in preproduction or in production or postproduction - the behavioral chess. That is, learning and being humbled by and also teaching certain people certain things. I love that. As a producer, you have an opportunity to see the whole and bring people together.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

There is no better game in the world when you are in good company, and no worse game when you are in bad company.

We’re creatures of contact regardless of whether/ we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.

The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.

Sociology isthescience of talk, and there is onlyone law in sociology. Bad talk drives out good.

Conversation is a game of circles.

I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting, I would rather watch TV. Of course this becomes eventually known to the other person.

Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another.