Willa Cather Quotes

No matter where we are or how advanced we think we are, there are elemental issues of our civilization that stories help us work through.

For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.

I probably get more inspiration for human stories and idiosyncrasies than I do animal stories.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

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.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

'Cloud Atlas' is for everybody. The main character in the movie is humanity.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

The kinds of stories I want to be a part of telling are about delving into what it is to be a human being.

Men and women are both humans, so, for me, that makes my characters and the work that I do human stories.

I like the movies that embrace the complexity of the human condition.

I love how 'Game of Thrones' has resonated with so many people around the world. I feel like it has really tapped into our need to hear stories about the human condition, love, death, good, evil... For me, it really is a modern version of the old Greek theatre or cave men sitting around fires telling stories.

I have amassed an enormous amount of songs about every particular condition of humankind - children's songs, marriage songs, death songs, love songs, epic songs, mystical songs, songs of leaving, songs of meeting, songs of wonder. I pretty much have got a song for every occasion.

I want to tell stories that are true and that resonate and move people, that highlight both the tremendous beauty and ugliness available in the human experience.

I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.

It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.

There's always to me a universality - one of the things I learned early on as a journalist and a writer is that there's a universality in specifics. The more specific you get, the more universal it can be.

I'm always interested in people being able to share stories that allow us to see the landscape of human foibles, challenges, and ultimately triumph.

I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they're telling the truth. The fact is they're using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they're telling the truth about the human being- what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

Every story we remember is a novel. Novels make things more universal.