Mike Nichols Quotes

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

I like characters who remind me of someone I know.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Poems are other people's snapshots in which we see our own lives.

A lot of people have told me, you know, that what I've written about, they identify with strongly.

Even if the character is something that seems ridiculous on paper, there's a human element to everything. Otherwise, we don't connect with it.

I had self-doubt about whether my story was interesting to people. I didn't want to write something that was anecdotal. It was important to me that people would get something out of my book. I want people to read it and say, "Now I don't feel so alone," or "I'm going to remember that next time I'm being an asshole."

One of the things that I love when I go to a film or when I'm reading some book or whatever, is to be told a secret I thought only I knew and then someone says, "Oh my gosh, you know, too." And film can take us into private moments in a way that the theater, I think, kind of can't, and that's one of the reasons I like doing films. And the way a book can is that these little secrets and the private things that go on in our minds that maybe we haven't shared with anyone, and then someone writes it or shows it to you in a film, you think, "Oh, that's me. Oh my God, that's me, I have that secret."

The idea of being a character who is kind of isolated, I can relate to that.

At the end of the day, I choose something that makes my heart beat, that I can relate to, that's very complex, or human.

This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

People always loved best what they identified most with.

I cry at the end of every episode of "Girls." I'm just so overwhelmed by the truthfulness with which [Lena Dunham] conveys human nature.

I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.

It just seduces you when you read a story and your brain relates to it. You recognize or connect with it. You identify with it; you're bound to.

My favorite thing is watching people watch The Hollars movie and then come up to me and say whether they went through an experience like that or they went through an experience nothing like that, but it still was their mom or "that was my brother" or whatever it was - that's great.

I really focus on what my fans will take from it, people living their day-to-day lives. At the end of the day, the music isn't for me; it's for people who are going through their struggles and want to relate to someone who feels the same way they do. I've got to go all-in, expressing myself, right there in the moment.

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.

Sometimes the lines in a song are lines you wish you could text-message somebody in real life.

There was something almost painful about that, the intensity of being so vulnerable and so intimate with him.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

The number one thing I want my videos to be is relatable.