Mark Twain Quotes

You could perhaps better tell the story of a place by writing of a tiny village as a sort of prism into the bigger issues the culture was facing. It struck me as a better way to learn about a place, or at least a different way, than just going to interview the president. So I have often tried to tell the story of a place through people there. But I'm just amazed.

‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

Popular literature and culture used to reflect people's aspirations, pain, and passion. All those particular things are no longer available to us.

I never had any urge or desire to do like a big spectacular movie with thousands and thousands of extras. I'd rather watch paint drying. But put me in a room with three people having a hard time, like a character situation, and then you're into a really intense portraiture kind of concept.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

That is almost the whole of Russian literature: the phenomenal coruscations of the souls of quite commonplace people.

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

As actors, we want to go find the humanity and make it more nuanced and fill in the colors, rather than just being suit people who crack cases, 'cause they aren't that.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I'd pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person--a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experiences--a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've ever known.

While playing complex characters you're staying in the same place but you're departing with your mind and soul and educating yourself until you can really understand such huge worlds. Those are the roles that keep loyal to the authenticity of what people are, and not caricatures. It's something that requires me to prepare for three, four months. I love the process of it, rather than, "Okay, I'm ready, I'm set with the wardrobe that somebody else chose for me."

The purpose of art is to reflect new emerging values and to define the new heroes and heroines so that people can absorb them into their perceptions.

Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.

The actors that I do know are people who I think have souls, you know?

My job is to portray real human beings and real human experiences, and if I haven't had a real human experience myself outside of the film industry, how am I going to be able to do that?

Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.