Rachel Kushner Quotes

I get a lot of people saying to me, 'Oh, you're the actor who plays the nutters,' and I'm not. I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.

Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'

The contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating, all at the same time.

The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.

I know myself - I cannot just play a cliche. It has to be a character; it has to be written with the complexity of the human being behind. Could be bad, could be good, could be someone we would hate, but still, I need a reason for that influence, and I need to understand why.

For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves.

I think humans are fascinating in general. We're so weird. We do so many quirky things, and we don't even know it. There's just so many layers upon layers of nuances in everything we do, and the most fun part as an actor is trying to get into all those nuances, whether they're conscious or unconscious.

What character actors want to do is investigate new types of people and present them in all their idiosyncrasies, psychological complexities, and contradictory stupidities. That has been one of the great delights over our seven collaborations.

My dad was always interested in characters he didn't understand - he was such a great bad guy in movies. And that is really the thing that calls me to the material often: something I struggle to understand in human behaviour.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

There is no accounting for human beings.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

I think it's interesting playing characters who are flawed and make mistakes because we all have - no one's just one thing - no one is just bad or just good - so I like finding flawed characters and playing with their redeeming qualities, whether you play it outwardly or not. I think that one of the reasons I'm an actor is that I love people and I love finding out who they are and why they do the things they do, so it is fun to play those kinds of characters.

Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality.

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

I suppose it's too bad people can't be a little more consistent. But if they were, maybe they would stop being people.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.