Mary McDonnell Quotes

I thought this was the most incredible opportunity. Because 'Planet Of The Apes,' aside from the fantasy element of talking apes, is such an amazing franchise, because under the surface of that genre, you're actually looking at human nature.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

Fiction seeks to represent human experience as it is lived and as it reverberates in our hopes, fears, dreams, and memories. So much of our lives are internal. The art of fiction has claimed - more than anything else - this internal ground as its own.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

It's kind of a misnomer about science fiction that science fiction is about anything other than people. It's about people doing stuff, sometimes doing extraordinary stuff.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

That's part of the beauty of being an actress: you get to explore different facets of what it is to be a human being and what it is to explore different personalities, and actually, that's one of the things I love about it.

I'm not interested in going and doing a big, action-adventure romp with nothing to say about being a human being.

Telling a story is the way of exploring so many different things - human behavior, society, whatever existence.

Despite what everyone thinks about science fiction, ultimately, at its best, it's about human beings with human emotions.

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

What irritates me about sci-fi is that it got hijacked by video games and also became so high-concept it was all about ideas and gadgets and technology and nothing about the human experience.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

My favorite sci-fi always uses its hook to amplify some bigger theme or idea - some emotional thrust.

Acting makes you look at life and try to understand it in a beautiful way.

I love sci-fi, especially when it thrives on a thought-provoking story, rather than explosions.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

The genre of science fiction is a fun house, an amusement park ride, but it's also a problem. The question that's always being indirectly asked is this: 'Just who do we think we are and, further, who do we want to be?'

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.

All my books are adventures, but they also have a social viewpoint.

I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.

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

Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.