Alfonso Cuaron Quotes

You can't write if you can't relate.

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?

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

It's the only way I really know how to tell the story is to be able to kind of live through the characters. So when I find something that resonates with me, it's usually because it cuts to something very real inside of me; something that I've gone through or experienced.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

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.

I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.

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.

If I want people to connect to my words and my stories, I need to tell them where they came from. Because then, when you break into song, they have kind of a blueprint for why I wrote that song, so they can come to it with something they went through that helps them connect to it.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

I like to write about lots of things in real life that people can relate to, that people can I guess connect with and the fans could understand what I'm talking about.

I'm always careful about the thing I'm writing to make sure a viewer can imagine it happening to themselves.

I'm not the kind of writer that can wake up and say, "Okay, I'm gonna write a song today," and have that song be the kind I would want to record. The songs of mine that I end up liking are songs that come from real experience. They're like chapter titles in my life.

To me, as a director and an actor, that's the main thing. "What's the heart of this story? What's the humanity of this story? And if the movie doesn't have it, then why am I watching it?" Even if it's a silly comedy, like Superbad or Knocked Up - Judd Apatow, I love, because he's all about heart. The humor comes out of the humanity.

Are people drawn to each other because of the stories they carry inside?

That's what I miss, being a real human.

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.

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words.

I've had that situation where I start writing somebody really miserable, and in order to make the story come alive, I have to give them a vote of confidence, make him vulnerable or wounded. But in real life, you often meet people who, in that particular moment, actually shouldn't get a vote of confidence.

I can fill my cup up with real human interactions that allow me to be an actor. If I had no basis for relationships, as Kristen Bell, the human, I couldn't be an actress.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.