Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't be funny for funny's sake. You try to get as outrageous situation as you can but it always has to be believable and based in real character motivations and what people would really do.
It's a complex relationship when your dad happened to be president and you are president and then you have all the amateur psychology that goes on when people try to speculate about motivations.
I don't do villains often enough. There are two approaches: give them sympathetic, reasonable motivations for doing the most unspeakable things, or get inside heads that are interestingly broken.
At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.
We're all vulnerable to social approval. The need to belong, to be approved or appreciated by our peers is among the highest human motivations. But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies.
It is helpful to think of people as having two fundamental motivations: the desire to see ourselves as honest, good people, and the desire to gain the benefits that come from cheating - on our taxes or on the football field.
Two actors who have different motivations and skill sets can work together and be magic. Charles Grodin and Robert DeNiro technically couldn't work more differently, and yet they made 'Midnight Run,' which is a genius comedy.
You have to think an awful lot about your motivations or people's behavioral intentions or what their body language can indicate or what's really going on or what makes people sometimes do, sometimes, the irrational things they do.
I'm such a dork, but I really think there are derivatives to be found between story arcs and character motivations. And the way you evaluate functions is a really interesting way to look at stories and the way you act. I really believe it.
The motivations of kings in British history can generally be reduced to two: the quest for territory and the search for a male heir. No king was secure on his throne until he had a son, and no queen consort was ever really safe without a boy.
The distinction is large in my mind. The gay police captain is eventually going to be wearing hot pants and singing 'YMCA.' The police captain who happens to be gay is going to be a huge collection of personality characteristics and motivations.
The pavilion that seems to intercept divine aid does not cover God but occasionally covers us. God is never hidden, yet sometimes we are, covered by a pavilion of motivations that draw us away from God and make Him seem distant and inaccessible.
I read about violent things. I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book, and I can walk away.
Sequels are generally done in a rush. They're done with a sense of urgency. The first time, you spend a long time developing to get it over the line. The second time, you don't. Your expectations are different, and your motivations are different.
Examining other people's motivations, other people's language and other people's way of interacting is much more fascinating to me than spending a lot of time worrying about my own. I've said, 'What other people think of me is none of my business.'
A good lie detector doesn't jump to conclusions but tries to understand the person across the table, her personality, and her motivations. Your goal as a lie spotter isn't to point the finger and say, 'You're lying' - your goal is to get to the truth.
I'm a stickler for structure. So I tend to make sure I'm hitting certain points in the script and that I'm progressing and moving things along. You know, are the characters keeping the plot moving along? And are they true, and do I know their motivations?
Besides the mistakes that are pointed out, I love the way readers become involved with the characters. When readers start asking about character motivations instead of concentrating on the special effects, it means you're connecting with them on a personal level.
The American people should not wonder where their military leaders draw the line between military advice and political preference. And our nation's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines should not wonder about the political leanings and motivations of their leaders.
I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world, but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.
I'm not comparing it with cricketers who get huge money. But getting some financial benefits do motivate players, especially athletes. I appreciate this move by the state government. A state like Haryana has been producing more and more players because of such motivations.
My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people - their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself.
The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.
The idea that the law should punish what is rude; that government should protect our tender sensibilities from those who would - quite often with shallow motivations but sometimes with deeper and more serious complaints - challenge our national certainties and rituals, should alarm and anger us.
To be successful, it is imperative that you not only know the organizations you work with, but more specifically, you have to know the actual people you work with within these organizations, understand what their personal goals and motivations are. In short, to be successful, you need to humanize your clients.
My general philosophy of playing bad guys, which I've sort of done, you know, half the time is, you know, very few people who we view as bad guys get out of bed and think, 'What evil, terrible thing am I going to do today?' Most people see their motivations as justified - as, you know, justifying whatever they do.
Certainly, your characters - whether they are superheroes are not - should have foibles. They should have problems; they should have things that their powers can't solve. That's what makes them nuanced, interesting characters. They can have intense motivations. They should have intense motivations to do what they do.
Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.
There's nothing ever monetarily or fame-seeking or any of the other motivations that sometimes go hand-in-hand with this profession. To me, it's just not like that. I'm on a journey of self-discovery and trying to avoid total existential crisis. That's the kind of operating zone that I'm approaching this business from.
I try to keep in my mind the simple question: Am I trying to do good or make myself look good? Too many of our responsibilities get added to our plate when we are trying to please people, impress people, prove ourselves, acquire power, increase our prestige. All those motivations are about looking good more than doing good.
President Obama likes to say Guantanamo Bay is a terrorist recruiting tool, and while that may be an easy excuse, it's simply not true. The reality is the motivations of radical Islamic jihadism existed before Guantanamo Bay. The ideology is premised on a narrative of conquest, in the spiritual as well as the earthly world.
Radical jihadists hate Americans for who we are. They cannot be managed. They cannot be trusted. Engaging them is a tragic fool's errand. We need to realize that they are at war with us and that we cannot control their motivations. We instead need to confront them, contain them, and ultimately defeat them before they defeat us.
In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.
I'm a better person in a relationship, and I'm a happier person. I need to come home at the end of the day and have it not be about me and my freaking hair and makeup and character motivations anymore. And I think my work is more inspired when home is safe and sound and solid, because what I do for a living is so bananas and so insecure.
Eventually, understanding the motivations of the terrorists and dealing with the injustices that pervade our society, and repairing the institutions of justice, particularly the police and the judiciary, will be a much more effective way of fighting terror, than laws which give more draconian powers to corrupt and insensitive police organisations.