Steven Bochco Quotes

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there's nothing like making a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

The real effect of the WTC calamity has been depressed spirits, anxiety, and uncertainty among publishers, and of course those emotions are not restricted to publishers.

I think there is pressure on people to turn every negative into a positive, but we should be allowed to say, 'I went through something really strange and awful and it has altered me forever.'

I had a pretty public divorce. They're not easy - divorces - and it took me a long time to really get through.

There's so much of, it could have been a very critical examination of what happened, and really the emotional lives of the people involved sort of carry the characters forward.

Pain leaves a mark, the degree depending on the person and the event.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

I have this helicopter crash, and I fall in love with this man who was in the crash with me. I must have been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Disasters like Oklahoma City and 9/11 were time-limited. The children who were affected psychologically could go to a place of normalcy.

Many great stories are father issues, mother issues or death.

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

I've been fascinated with the subject of loss for a long time. In particular, I'm interested in how people, consciously or unconsciously, spend their lives replacing the things they lost when they were children.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

My story is just my story, and it's not nearly as traumatic as some.

I know people with PTSD, and it's very real and very hard. But it doesn't change your core character.

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

When it comes to my interpersonal relationships with men, of course, a lifetime of abuse vastly affected everything I did. I always came from a place of abuse, actually wanting, welcoming, and accepting it because that was my language. It never seemed strange to me.

I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.