Mo Yan Quotes

I relate to people and roles that are about the arc of human experience, things that everyday people deal with every day.

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 sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.

What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you're confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.

I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

What interests me is trying to catch the reflection of the human being on the page. I'm interested in how ordinary people live their lives.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

I think that when we look at something that's well acted and a story that's well told, it allows us to be a mirror of who we are as human beings and as a culture, and offers a glimpse of where we're headed.

I always liked characters that were more grounded in reality.

I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh.

I want to try and portray characters that are in real life, that you see day-to-day. If I were to just stay in my little village in Wales, I would have gotten a very small taste of a very big plate.

Literature universalizes the truth.

I'm really into the human interest thing. I really like regular people.

I'm really interested in real people in extraordinary situations. The detail and reality to that.

I want to show that drama doesn't lie only in blood and destroyed buildings but in daily life, in ordinary human beings.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

Some of the songs are inspired by personal things that have happened. Others have been inspired by other people's stories, you know, like someone that witnesses something and so I tell the story through my own eyes. And some songs are just about how I feel about the world and others about the places that we have travelled to.

We write stories about common people and common things. That's what Skynyrd always is about - the real working class of America.

I write from what I take to be the realist's point of view, looking at life as it really is - or the way I see it to be.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

'Women's' war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats; there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.