A Quote by Evan Hunter

I only knew one thing about policemen: they were inhuman beasts. The problem was how to turn them into likable, sympathetic human beings. The answer was simple. Give them head colds. And first names. And keep their dialogue homey and conversational.

Evan Hunter

Quote Topics

About Answer Beasts Beings Dialogue First First Name Give Head Homey How Human Human Being Human Beings Inhuman Keep Knew Likable Names One Thing Only Policemen Problem Simple Sympathetic Them Thing Turn Were

Quote Author

Evan Hunter
American - Author
October 15, 1926 - July 6, 2005

There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.

Derek Cianfrance

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

John Irving

I am by nature not a list-keeper, but I do keep lists of names and add at least one or two every single day without exception. First names, last names, middle names, combinations of. I've collected more over the years than I can possibly ever use in a single lifetime, but I keep the list going nonetheless. I tell my students that it's a habit, an act of attention, that will keep them engaged, keep them thinking about characters and stories, and how that match might get made.

Jack Driscoll

Well, I think “likability” is an overused word. I don’t watch people 'cause I like them; I watch them because they’re compelling. Sympathetic is a little different... Likable just thins you out. Working to make a character likable is what kills most TV shows.

Louis C. K.

And it is impossible to treat human beings as human beings if you label them, if you term them, if you give them a name as Hindus, Russians, or what you will. It is so much easier to label people, for then you can pass by and kick them, drop a bomb on India or Japan.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The girl wondered: These policemen... didn't they have families, too? Didn't they have children? Children they went home to? How could they treat children this way? Were they told to do so, or did they act this way naturally? Were they in fact machines, not human beings? She looked closely at them. They seemed of flesh and bone. They were men. She couldn't understand.

Tatiana de Rosnay

I think these people [Al-Qaida, terrorists] need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.

Michael Savage

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

J. M. Coetzee

In all the dictatorships, there's such a non-understanding of what human beings are. I mean, if you believe in the Bible, you have the story of Adam and Eve and God tells them, "Do whatever you want. The only thing you shouldn't do is eat the apple." What do they do the first thing? They eat the apple. So if you know a little bit the psychology of human beings, you have to understand that if you say something you should not do, then everybody wants to do it.

Marjane Satrapi

I get so sick and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents did to them. You know what your parents did to you? The best thing they could do. The best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.

Leo Buscaglia

Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them.

Robert Wilson Lynd

There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.

Margaret Geller

The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.

Carl R Trueman

Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.

Desmond Tutu

Food is one part. Love is another part. I cut their hair, I give them a shave, I give them bath. For them, to feel psychologically that they are also human beings, there are people to care for them, they have a hand to hold, hope to live. So, the food will give them physical nutrition. The love and affection which you show, will give them mental nutrition.