Top 100 Dolan Quotes & Sayings

The problems I have with a flawed script are always revealed in the editing room. — Xavier Dolan

I'm very much a hypochondriac, worried about dying, and not having enough time to work with the people I want to work with and being fulfilled as an actor. — Xavier Dolan

I don't really mind not being a part of a film - because if there is no part for me, I will never force myself upon a film. I feel like it's just a distraction. If it is not organically incorporated into the story, it just feels like a stupid appearance, like a sort of wink. I hate that. — Xavier Dolan

We must never allow September 11th to become a time for protest and division. Instead, this day must remain a time for promoting peace and mutual respect. — Timothy Dolan

Homosexuality is like an inside baseball thing. It's like a gag that people share; 'How is your husband?' But when it comes to bringing diversity to a broader audience, suddenly it's a different road. It's what we call 'a risk.' Isn't it our responsibility to elevate the standards and change people's perceptions? — Xavier Dolan

Orson Welles was lazy. He was a late bloomer. — Xavier Dolan

Who would have believed that a Wushu Master of the tenth degree black sash could need such a release? — Fierce Dolan

The scene of independent cinema is already a large scene in America, and not in a negative way, but it's cluttered. It's very populated with just American films, so the room left for foreign movies is not extremely vast. The American public also does not really read. They don't read subtitles. But we're like that in Canada, too. — Xavier Dolan

The memories you have are just recordings of things past, not chains to bind you. — Michael Dolan

When I write a film, I have already made the trailer — Xavier Dolan

What motivates every other decision artistically or technically is the acting. This is what motivates everything. Never can a camera move be incompatible with the emotion of the actor at that moment. The movement, the style, the atmosphere, everything is dictated by the actor. — Xavier Dolan

What advice do you have for writers working on their first novels?
If you feel called to write a book, consider it a gift. Look around you. What assistance is the universe offering you as support? I was given an amazing mentor, a poet, Eleanor Drewry Dolan, who taught me the importance of every word. To my utter amazement, there were times she found it necessary to consult three dictionaries to evaluate one word. — Kathleen Grissom

The subconscious mind, like the Good Lord, can work in a mysterious way, and mine has been known to work in a way that is completely unintelligible, if not downright barmy. — John Dolan

I fantasize about making reality better. — Fierce Dolan

I don't find it hard to direct myself. I can easily think of me as a horrible performer or a good performer. I work with actors who cannot stand watching or looking at themselves, which is not my case. I can have an eye and perspective on whether I'm terrible or good enough for me. — Xavier Dolan

The American educational psychologist Patricia Alexander has expressed the view that fear paralyses and curiosity empowers. Accordingly, she reasons, we should always be more interested than afraid. — John Dolan

Amazing, life-altering anonymous picture quotes on FaceBook: Are they created by graphic designers who steal quotes or don't bother to research the author, or are they original and just have exceptionally less ego than I do? Cos if I ever write something that brilliant it's gonna have flashing headlights. — Fierce Dolan

I don't think the way I portray mother's and son's relationships has anything to do with my age or generation. It has to do with what I lived with my own mother and what it's transformed into and the point of view it has given me on mothers and women. The way I was brought up with women. It's all about personal background. — Xavier Dolan

My first pastoral letter's gonna be a condemnation of light beer and instant mashed potatoes
I hate those two things. — Timothy M. Dolan

I'd like to do something meaningful in the smallest ways, not just words or idiotic writing. — Xavier Dolan

All my life, I heard, 'Stop daydreaming,' 'Get over yourself,' 'You'll never get there,' 'Aim lower,' 'You'll hurt yourself,' from teachers, family, and friends. — Xavier Dolan

Sometimes I come across as superficial. Of this I am aware. However, you may be confident that inside my head I am forever plumbing new shallows, finding novel ways to express the obvious, reheating old jokes. — John Dolan

I hadn't watched any Hitchcock movies when I made 'Tom at the Farm,' except for 'Vertigo' when I was 8 years old. I don't have a sophisticated film knowledge, but I have seen the legacy of classic movies in broader entertainment. — Xavier Dolan

'Heartbeats' is a film on people magnifying and subliming reality when they're in love. Hence the overstylized look, the aesthetics, the robes, the dresses, the vintage, hipster-ish look: All of this is voluntary. I'm not a hipster. I'm not! — Xavier Dolan

When you have permission from me to be the wolf, you'll have no need for guilt as a human. — Fierce Dolan

When someone is repulsed by the sound of body noises like eating, there's a name for that. Misophonia. — Alex Dolan

This was the move that was supposed to sweep me away. She seemed a little out of practice. I guess life with Charley Royce hadn't exactly been the third reel of The English Patient. It had to be bad if Mickey Dolan was your back-up. Not to put Mickey down but he didn't strike me as the lover-boy type. Especially when he took out his teeth. The last time Mickey thought about pleasing anybody but himself was just before he discovered how to sniff glue. — Dan Ahearn

I am going to give from every corner of my soul. — Michael Dolan

Everyone burns, as the Buddha says, in their own way. Some burn with anger, some with lust, some with a desire for vengeance, some with fear. But inside us burn many fires, not just one. We are legion, we contain a multitude. — John Dolan

If you complain about the world moving too fast, slow down. — Michael Dolan

We [in the MBA] get to create a situation where we're really choosing the students to join our environment based upon what we think they can teach the rest of us. We're always trying to attract people who are going to bring excitement and intellectual curiosity into our classrooms in our environment. — Robert J. Dolan

My aunt Julie was a production manager, and she heard of an opening. Some show was looking for children to run around the house or whatever. I auditioned and got the part, and I showed up in all of my monstrous energy, bouncing everywhere like an electron. — Xavier Dolan

I design all of the costumes for my movies, actually. — Xavier Dolan

Prayer immediately turns us into something greater than ourselves. — Timothy M. Dolan

Writing is the best anti-depressant. — Fierce Dolan

What I'm interested in is how your career choices can affect your private life, romantically or with your mom, your relatives, your friends, your hometown, and how media manipulates information - not newspapers or blogs, but the magazines that people impulse-buy that tell you what's hot and who's not. — Xavier Dolan

I have the impression that every time I'm heartbroken, I leave a bit of myself behind. I am the believer. I go back and do the same mistakes over and over again and sign them proudly. — Xavier Dolan

I'd rather be referred to as a precocious young Quebec talent, than not be referred to at all. — Xavier Dolan

Cardinal Dolan, of course, has a very, very hard job: trying to hold up Catholic family values in sexually liberal New York City. I'm not saying New York is the Gay Mecca. But it's at least Gay-rusalem. — Stephen Colbert

Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst. — Paul Dolan

The nature and the DNA of IMAX has been redefined in the past years to shoot these huge blockbusters. But I think that it's not the sole purpose of IMAX to capture cars exploding in your face. — Xavier Dolan

It's become a habit to make films where the father is absent. My father impresses me, but the father figure does not. — Xavier Dolan

It was a privilege to direct the music video for Adele's beautiful, heartbreaking song, 'Hello.' When I first heard it, all the images appeared clearly in my head - and her trust and generosity allowed me to work with abandon artistically and emotionally, like she always does. It made me extremely proud. — Xavier Dolan

I've been recording forever. I'm a watcher. I'm a stalker. I love everything about people. It's always been a passion for me to observe. — Xavier Dolan

If you go, go in Peace it makes the flowers sweeter along the path. — Michael Dolan

I have struggles in screenwriting that lead me to a third act that's always more or less efficiently wrapped up in a fourth act that's trying to give closure to too many things. — Xavier Dolan

I'd like to be taken in charge of as an actor, not to be abandoned with asinine dialogue and meaningless actions or stereotyped characters. I'd like to feel like I'm in a character driven story. — Xavier Dolan

My extreme characters are in a state of rebellion or who are being ostracized or being misunderstood, or misfits or trying to fit in and fighting for their rights to love, live, and co-exist. They sort of mirror my own demons. — Xavier Dolan

Our children form a large part of our Immortality Project. This is one of the reasons a child's death cuts so deep; some of the future dies with them. Through them and their descendants, part of us lives on forever, just as it does in the friends we touch and the ripples our actions cause in the world. All these effects are conscripts, earthwork defences against the finality of extinction. — John Dolan

When reading I pretend I'm an editor, though when writing I realize I'm not. — Fierce Dolan

We are all different human beings, and we all have different backgrounds, and we stem from different social strata. That is what defines how you hear people talk, how you want to quote them when you speak. We all have different fears and doubts and complexes and this is what shapes the way we see other people. Especially characters. — Xavier Dolan

To me, the idea of success is to be able to work with people you admire. — Xavier Dolan

I've met people of great faith. I sat in the home of Billy Graham and in the residence of Cardinal Dolan and prayed with these men of God. — Mitt Romney

Marriage is the real vocation crisis in the United States ... We have a vocation crisis to life-long, life-giving, loving, faithful marriage. If we take care of that one, we'll have all the priests and nuns we'll need for the Church. — Timothy M. Dolan

I got a part in a package of commercials for this big drugstore from the age of 6 to 10. For four years I shot those commercials, and old ladies would stop me on the street and grab my cheeks. That's how it started. — Xavier Dolan

'Titanic' made me want to tell stories ... To have all these characters and costumes and have ambition and think big and have dreams ... It came at a very troubled period of my life. — Xavier Dolan

For me, 'Mommy' was about developing very humane characters that would be very credible and endearing and work onscreen. — Xavier Dolan

I personally believe it's really important for the students to experience a particular culture. — Robert J. Dolan

Impossible as it seemed, many of these older ladies, who never stirred from the house past sunset, had either not heard the tales of his behavior two nights ago or had not believed them.
The ones who did obviously has enough manners, or at least enough sense, to keep quiet in the presence of his mother. Had anyone said anything outright, his mother would probably have no qualms about asking the offender to choose a weapon and name her second. — Kate Dolan

Time can move quickly when it loses its memory, or when there are no new memories to create. Reality's vulture flies down and picks at the bones of our dreams. — John Dolan

For me, hipsterism is for one to appropriate the codes of a social class or another milieu that wasn't theirs originally, in order to define their personality through something different and unique. Which is why a lot of hipsters live downtown, and they're dressed as farmers. Then you have the Oscar Wilde hipster: the dandy. — Xavier Dolan

Acting is everything to me and it's at the core of every decision. Whatever importance costumes, details, lights, camera, dialogue and everything else have, if the acting is bad, cheap, or overdone everything else is just gone. — Xavier Dolan

With fame, money and sex settled, he had to find something else to fight, and like any honorable man he chose to fight his own people. And that was how Byron the sentimental poet of graveyards and lost loves became the Satanic joker all England loved to hate. — John C. Dolan

Work as if you own the company and soon you just might. — Michael Dolan

As a director you want to have actors, not only surpassing themselves, but also going somewhere, going different places. — Xavier Dolan

Pay with compliments and you will always be wealthy. — Michael Dolan

I write across several genres. I'm a slut for words. I can't keep it in my literary pants. — Fierce Dolan

A car can't operate without the mechanical systems working, but it can operate with a few dents and scratches ... you are the same. — Michael Dolan

A kind soul knows impoliteness is just preoccupied with distraction. — Michael Dolan

The National Catholic Register's coverage of the Church universal, and the Church in our own country, is splendid. — Timothy M. Dolan

Men are born privileged in the scale of things - I'm generalizing, but it's true. Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it's a cliche, that feminists are reactionary, all these things. — Xavier Dolan

In order to find yourself you need to get lost in the forest of life. — Michael Dolan

The motivation for making movies is that people actually see them. — Xavier Dolan

Desire is a chameleon.
He blends into the brickwork and the rocks of those lanes and pathways down which we walk. He lurks like a highwayman at the crossroads of our lives, waiting to rob us of our reason.
And he does so for sport. — John Dolan

When I saw Bryan Singer's 'Usual Suspects,' I knew how it was going to end because I'd seen 'Scary Movie.' Which is not the preferred order of things, but that's how it is because my childhood was 'Home Alone,' 'Matilda,' 'Batman Returns,' 'Jumanji,' 'Secret Garden,' 'Jack,' 'Mrs. Doubtfire,' 'Titanic.' Only family films from the '90s. — Xavier Dolan

The only just government is the government that serves its citizens, not itself. — Timothy M. Dolan

Despite the perturbations of the world, life goes on.
The sky presents an endless canopy of translucent blue. The still air is suffused with sunshine.
Perhaps tomorrow the beneficent clouds will gather and it will finally rain. The earth will cool and revive and in that seminal moment all our sins perchance will be washed away.
It might happen.
But somehow I doubt it. — John Dolan

Karma means 'action'. Like many, you misunderstand its nature. Past misdeeds can be corrected before your karma ripens: it is not some pre-determined fate. It is what you do now that counts. — John Dolan

Care not what they say about the color of your skin let the brilliant light of your soul blind them. — Michael Dolan

Be the light in the dark, be the calm in the storm and be at peace while at war. — Michael Dolan

I think anything is possible to anyone who dreams, dares, works and never gives up. — Xavier Dolan

I don't think it's particularly useful to be going to another country and staying in a classroom and just studying in the classroom. What's important, I think, is to get immersed into the local economy. — Robert J. Dolan

Screw technicolor, red, and foreign languages. I dream in status updates. — Fierce Dolan

I'm sick of people imposing cultural references and influences on me, but I'm not sick of people talking about my age. — Xavier Dolan

The peace you seek is there, it's there between all the traffic in your mind, stop and rest for peace will find you if you let it. — Michael Dolan

Film-making is not liberating. It drains a lot out of you, and it's fulfilling only temporarily. It's a very thankless thing at times. When you're spending all that time on a film, you don't want 40,000 people to see it - it's just not enough. You dream of more. — Xavier Dolan

You have compassion but by itself it is not enough. It is almost as if you carry around inside you some dead thing. Some heavy black cinder in your heart that burdens you; a ponderous anchor that tethers you to the past. Until you can burn it away, you can never truly live in the present, in the now. Until you can live in the now, you cannot see things as they really are. Meantime you are a man who is wilfully blind. You have eyes and yet you will not use them. — John Dolan

There might be a proper age to know how to tell a story, but there's no proper age to start telling them. — Xavier Dolan

When I first got to Cannes, I was very insecure about everything, so I put on this extravagant facade. Can you blame me? I was 19. — Xavier Dolan

I don't belong to any school or clique or ghetto. I don't have any preconceived ideas. I'm trying to serve a story and not a genre or a style. — Xavier Dolan

An editor asked me what led me to write erotica. I replied, A dirty mind, excess words, and an overactive sacral chakra. — Fierce Dolan

The secret of landscapes isn't creation ... It's maintenance. — Michael Dolan

Do you know, by the way, that German is the only language in the world that has a word for 'pleasure derived from the misfortune of others'? Schadenfreude. — John Dolan