Paul Bloom Quotes

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

Personally, I see little distinction between an artistic mentality and criminality. You couldn't possibly create a compelling story without some wickedness or some fascination with the disgusting. Being good is a hindrance to a writer.

I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot. But a lot of effective and interesting radio is based on one character who reacts to the world.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

The human mind, I believe, cares for the True only in the general character of an epoch.

There is an interesting scientific dispute about realism and optimism. Some find that very optimistic people have benign illusions about themselves. These people may think they have more control, or more skill, than they actually do. Others have found that optimistic people have a good handle on reality. The jury is still out.

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

Even Charles Darwin, that human decoder ring of bizarre behavior, found the idea of saving a stranger's life to be a total head-scratcher.

From earliest times, humans - explorers and thinkers - have wanted to figure out the shape of their world. Forever, the way we've done that is through storytelling. It is difficult to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

I always look at films as real stories with real people in real situations. That's why I struggle with the whole notion of calling someone the 'good guy' or the 'bad guy', because I think we all have potential to do good things and all have the potential to do bad things.

One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and pettiness and murderousness.

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

I have a hard time keeping a story straight when I tell the truth because when you start lying you have to remember what you said, and I'm not very good at that.

There's no harmony in most people in a way, and I'm attracted to it, and I think it makes for good storytelling.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

'Greek Street' is a very strange beast. I think of it as 'The Long Good Friday' meets 'Agamemnon.' A way of using those fantastically rich stories from Greek tragedy to take a look at our world and to explore some of the things I think about this world.

Human nature stays the same, the one thing that stays constant, like death and taxes. And people still want good stories!

I think all good reporting is the same thing - the best attainable version of the truth.

It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.