Neal Brennan Quotes

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.

I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality, and I don't like when things break their spell.

I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.

Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted 'One Day' to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative.

It's counterproductive. The problem with sentimentality is that it kills the emotion.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

Why can't people just say they were moved? Why do they have to say it's sappy?

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

Sentimentality is a false sense of self.

As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'

Mushy novels, pretty pictures, pretty sculpture, decorations on the wall, nice parallel lines - make me sick.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?

There is no more subtle dissolvent of morals than sentimentality.

A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

If you just tell the story of what the storys about, then it sparks curiosity, but I think it also arouses suspicion, as you say, that it could be overly sentimental. But it so isnt. And I think it was all about doing the inner work and then underplaying everything.

It's quite easy to make a load of people laugh, it's often a reflex action, but I think to make them cry is harder without manipulating them.

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.

There is a sort of mystery to kitsch. When did it begin? If it is just simply another name for faking emotions, it ought to have been a permanent part of the human condition.

There is a fine line I have to walk throughout the writing process in a novel. It is this line between drama and melodrama, and it is this line between evoking genuine emotional power and being manipulative.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.