Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.
Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.
I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior.
Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
There's something about trying to figure out why someone is doing something that on the outside is horrible - what drives them to do that? What could drive any human being to that kind of behaviour?
I still ponder what gets in people's minds and souls, why they do the things they do.
Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.
No matter how bad the individual, everybody has reasons for why they do what they do.
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
Ideologies aren't all that important. What's important is psychology.
Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.
Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure... they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.
If there is a reason I'm able to make unsympathetic characters human, it's because it's my desire to find what drives the unsympathetic behavior. Almost always at the bottom of it is some deep insecurity. Putting your finger on what each individual's particular insecurity is goes a long way to fleshing that person out.
The thing that I love is human behavior - why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make - and that has to always be plot driven.
Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
