Stephen Daldry Quotes

It was blazing sunshine and I went on in a turquoise neck muff, glamorous dress and muddy boots and just had the best gig, really emotional. I've had emails from people saying that they cried. They promised it wasn't the drugs.

Well, part of the thing is, like, what's the difference between censorship and social responsibility? I sometimes find that the whole censorship argument is used as a way for people to avoid the fact that they're like.

Confronting the intolerable should be challenging and upsetting. Who could read the testimonies of Primo Levi and not feel intellectually and emotionally exhausted? Or Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, not to mention those of Malcolm X? It is the conditions that produce violence that should upset us ethically and prompt us to act responsibly, rather than to capitulate to a privatized emotional response that substitutes a therapeutic language for a political and worldly one.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

When I read scripts and when I read books, it's more of an emotional response and I was really drawn to these characters.

I assumed just from being around, all these years, that people would immediately glom on to, Well, it's a departure, and it's a dystopian kind of thing, and that's natural, of course. But it's surprised me - not even surprised me, but it's pleased me - how much people have been responding to the way the book was written.

It is not our responsibility to make it acceptable; it is our duty to make it available.

The Islamic ethic is that if God has given you the capacity or good fortune to be a privileged individual in society, you have a moral responsibility to society.

I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

The fact that I do place music at the end of my films is not to accentuate the emotion. It serves an opposite purpose which is to remove them from the emotional space and allow them to enter a space of thinking, because I believe that when the audience is watching the film they're watching it with their feelings.

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

There's something that intervenes and is very important which has to do with value. Value in the true biological sense, which is that contrary to what many people seem to think, taking it at face value - sorry for the pun - we do not give the same amount of emotional significance to every event.

Myrnin was silent for a beat, and then he said, "Bob would be very disappointed in you.

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings.

When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.

Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse.

But huge photographs of dead bodies are slightly different. I couldn't find much humor there.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

Viola Davis keeps saying this movie should be called The Big Responsibility instead of The Help, because there were so many groups of people that you wanna do right by. You want to do right by Southerners and the African-American community and the readers of the book and the people that grew up with domestics and the people who worked as domestics. There's a million different groups that you're trying to please and satisfy that you're worried about not loving what comes across onscreen.

There's a deep affection and respect for the Queen and the monarchy in the U.K. But Diana was an extraordinary, iconic figure and her death sparked a fierce reaction, part grief and part anger at her being taken away. It was very fraught.

Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility.