Hidden Motivations Quotes

I'm attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I'm interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I'm interested in the things people try to hide.

When you're a biographer, you want to explore the very things that your subject didn't care to talk about.

The left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.

I took in a breath. "What's the one thing you'd do," I asked. "if you could do anything?" Pass," he said. For a second I was sure I'd heard wrong. "What?" He cleared his throat. "I said, I pass." Why?" He turned his head and looked at me. "Because." Because why?" Because I just do.

What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.

With these words Jake had let go of me. Which proved that he knew more about why I was leaving than even I did. I had believed that I was running away from what had happened. I did not know, not until I met Nicholas days later, that the whole time I was really running towards what was yet to be.

I like repressed characters. That gives me a lot of freedom to make a lot of different choices through subtleties.

There had to be a reason why they were not going to marry. They had both been so adamant about it. What the devil was the reason?

Sometimes, Edie, a person's feelings aren't rational. At least, they don't seem that way on the surface. You have to dig a little deeper to understand what lies at the base

There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

When researchers try to break down what is happening at Mosaic, far too often they see the skin and miss the heart.

Look for the contradictions in every character, especially in your heroes and villains. No one should be what they first seem to be. Surprise the audience.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade,--the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, and forcing it on our distinct notice,--we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

God sees the secret springs of human action, and knows the hearts of all living.

People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges.

It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

The subconscious is like having a laboratory assistant who pretends to love you and help you, but after you go home to go to sleep it goes back into the lab and starts fumbling with the data and destroying it. It's a very tricky thing. People think our minds are us, but that's not true at all. The mind is not us.

There is such a difference between the pursuits of men in great cities that one part of the inhabitants lives to little other purpose than to wonder at the rest. Some have hopes and fears, wishes and aversions, which never enter into the thoughts of others, and inquiry is laboriously exerted to gain that which those who possess it are ready to throw away.

I think when I went to psychoanalysis, I actually believed that people said what they meant. This was my whole problem.

What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

I'm always interested in what we're not being shown. So if you're playing ostensibly a quote-unquote 'baddie,' what are their good sides, and vice versa.

I've always assumed there's a dark river flowing beneath my fans' desires.

The deepest secret in our heart of hearts is that we are writing because we love the world.

our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.