Stephen Karam Quotes

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

The human condition is the human condition, and what we try to do is illuminate the human condition.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

Everything that we have gone through, are going through, and will go through is there in Shakespeare. It is all of human life.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

Ultimately we've only got humanity to work with. It's only clay we've got.

Ultimately, a timeless story has to be about the human condition.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

Anything that's made by humans is about humans, whether it's about gods or aliens or anything; it's about some sort of expressive nature about us.

I'm using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human - it turns out that it's a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

I think from my experience in war and life and science, it all has made me believe that we have one life on this planet.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.