Anne McCaffrey Quotes

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

Being true to yourself involves showing and sharing emotion. The spirit that motivates most great storytellers is 'I want you to feel what I feel,' and the effective narrative is designed to make this happen. That's how the information is bound to the experience and rendered unforgettable.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

When did "sentimental" become a pejorative barb? I do not at all share the notion that a piece of music, or a poem, or a film that bypasses the brain and aims straight for the heart . . . should automatically be heaped with scorn. I think it is symptomatic of a sad and dangerous impoverishment of spirit.

You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.

I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theatre than when it came in.

I love to entertain, I love to make people laugh, cry, and move them, perhaps moving them in their lives.

Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

If you're feeling emotional when you're creating something, it'll sound that way.

Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus.

I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.

I don't have to come up with a ha-ha belly laugh every day, but drawings with warmth and love or ones that put a lump in the throat. That's more important to me than a laugh.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

I want to be able to make people laugh and cry and feel happy or sad and feel all these different emotions through singing and acting. Hopefully throughout my career, I'll get to pursue them.

Music is emotional. Your job is to make people feel something. The best way to do that is to sing and speak from something they've personally been through. That's where I write from.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

I think any great song is difficult to write, in some aspect. It's just difficult to make somebody feel something. That is the main goal. How do you make somebody want to get up and dance? How do you make somebody feel okay after their breakup?

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

I think every time I can find a story that touches that human nerve, and even sometimes makes you cry, I think that I've found something that I'll like very much.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.