The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.

Acting, really, is a lot of mental fatigue, emotional fatigue, concentration... it's mentally draining.

Loss is universal. I've lost grandparents that I dearly adored, lost animals that were like brothers to me. Many of us have gone through terrible breakups.

This was nostalgia in the literal Greek sense: the pain of not being able to return to one's home and family.

I think people are interesting enough. People with mental illness, or just real people going through real circumstances in life.

Whether I'm acting, writing, or directing, I want to tell the truth about human beings, especially my folk.

Opera is a key way of talking about life and all the things that are important to people in life.

Oh, humiliation is poisonous. It's one of the deepest pains of being human.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel pressed and tense almost every day of my life about something or other. And I think it's the one thing, as I look into people's eyes, that I think I...

My grandparents had died in 1983, and suddenly my brother is out jogging before Mass, and he dies.

My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never...

It's a very, very interesting experience to be talking to people who are such icons in their own right. When Adele came to a show, I was just talking to her, and at the time, I thought, 'I'm just...

It's clear to me that anyone, anywhere, can experience loneliness, isolation, solitude, and estrangement; and most people probably do encounter these things at some point in their lives.

Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.

What I really like about 'Red Band Society' is how real it is, and the experiences that they are going through are experiences that everyone is bound to go through at one point or another in their...

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

Not only was it nearly impossible to hear because of these huge rubber ears we had to wear, but we also had these huge furry hands which were absolutely useless, especially if you had to scratch...

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

Yes, at times in front of goal a fog descends. Perhaps the speed of my feet doesn't match up with that of my mind.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.