A Quote by Siri Hustvedt
It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.
Related Quotes
I am really drawn to damaged characters, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. Making those complicated characters empathetic is something to strive for. It's too easy to create a good guy or a good girl.
Plays can create empathy. If you put a Muslim character on stage, and make him a full character, you're making it possible for the audience to feel empathy, and a little empathy on both sides would help.
Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.
I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.
You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.
The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.
My characters are always unlucky in love. It's annoying, but perhaps there is something in me that is suited to characters that have a darkness. Maybe it's why I play such damaged people when I'm not particularly damaged myself, I would say.
Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.
Evil is easy to fight. Lack of wisdom...that is very hard indeed.
I have a real pet peeve for women who play damaged characters but don't look damaged.
I think women in our global patriarchal culture are told to shut their body down. And when we don't know why, we start to cut our body off. You cut off your curves. You cut off your breasts. You cut off the curve of your tush. You cut off your sexuality... and it's relegated to the bedroom.
It's so easy to disappear into your character because there isn't all this fuss around you, and we keep a closed set, and closed off to all crew members, even, unless we're cut. A lot of times, you're doing a scene in a movie and there are literally 35 people standing behind the camera all waiting to do their job, but here they have to be off the stage. On The Office, it is very much just the actors, a cameraman and a boom operator, like a real documentary, like we really are being documented.
I believe that lack of empathy is behind many problems, and I believe that it's disrupting our society. In Great Britain, there is a steady decline in the willingness to be truly generous, and by that I don't mean monetary generosity, but friendship and sympathy for others.
Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
The habit patterns of the human mind are very strong and make it seem that the hard way is easy and the easy way is hard.
I don't have a preference for bad people, no. I have an interest in playing a broad range of characters. Obviously, I'm mostly identified with a character who is very responsible, very solid and very intelligent, but there are plenty of questionable characters in my past career. I'm interested in exploring theatricality and characters with some dimension.
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