Neal Shusterman Quotes

To share a lot of ideas - not ideas - emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life. I mean, we're so different [in the cast], some of us. Miles apart. [But] when I see anyone from those days, I tap into that instant love for them.

Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

I'd say most of my songs I write from personal experience. When I feel like I don't have any inspiration in my personal life, I think about others that are close to me and maybe what they're going through or even just people I've come across, acquaintances.

I'm constantly being influenced by the soul that's directly in front of me.

I think anybody would be hard pressed not to relate to at least one of the characters, because there's so many different multifaceted people populating this crazy world.

For me, I feel like I relate to a lot of people.

I think there are things that are based in your own dealings with someone that is a personal dealing, not a public dealing. Because you have personal experiences.

Family is just the people you care about. We can bond with people that we have nothing in common with, even if it's just for a moment.

I think that human beings are often looking for a reason to relate.

That's always been the process of our music, in a sense, keeping it simple, not being so heavy that you are beating people over the head, it's just weighted down and it's like, "oohhh I can't relate." People are able to relate because we talked about things that everyone has experienced, it doesn't matter your race or genre. Music was your mainstay. There was something in our element of music that connected.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth.

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.

So whatever I find true for myself, other people might also relate to.

We're all subjective beings and trapped in our own realities and our own biographical stories and physical bodies and our histories - and that's the only way we can experience the world.

I wanted to see if I could create something that is emotional between people. Existing games are about killing each other or killing something together. The idea of social emotion means people need to share feelings. At that moment, the players are in sync. The problem [with many games] is there's no chance to share emotion. Most of them are busy, [there are] explosions everywhere. So we got rid of all the background noise and we had to get rid of the guns.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria. But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense. All friendships are negotiations of power.

I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.

I know that people have different ways to see me but I'm used to it.

I've had a lot of people come up to me after shows and tell me that "Dollhouse" really helped them with whatever they were going through with their families. I thought that was really amazing, that it could mean one thing for me but another thing for someone else.

You don't have to treat people differently. You may be living a different lifestyle, but the person living that different lifestyle still can relate to anybody and have the same amazing personality of the guy from North Philly.

Sexuality and love can be different things. I can be attracted to a woman sexually, but it doesn't mean I want to be in love with a woman. If I'm going to be with a woman sexually, it doesn't mean I'm a lesbian. We put these restraints and definitions on people, but it's hard to define.

I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.