My Sensibility Quotes & Sayings

I think everyone's different but in comedy, I try to do my scene to make the director and the other actors laugh. If I can make them laugh and we have the same sensibility, then I'm on the right page. — Ken Jeong

I call myself a feminist, not a feminist filmmaker. If somebody asked me if I had a feminist sensibility it would be pretty hard to deny, but is it the theme of my work? Not necessarily. I'm interested in a lot of things. — Callie Khouri

Referring to my desire to appropriate Italian, he [Domenico Starnone] wrote, 'A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility.' How much those words reassured me ... They contained all my yearning, all my disorientation. Reading this message, I understood better the impulse to express myself in a new language. To subject myself, as a writer, to a metamorphosis. — Jhumpa Lahiri

My mom was a model, and her laid-back but put-together sensibility really rubbed off on me. — Tony Parker

I think I'm ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian - that's home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I like making movies for myself and my friends and people with my sensibility. — Edward Norton

I am reading Ian Rankins book Doors Open and am enjoying his dark Edinburgh narrative will rate soon once I have read it. I am also a fan of Jane Austen and have visited her Museum House in Chawton, Hampshire every year for the last three years. My Favourite book is Sense and Sensibility. — Ian Rankin

If I only acted, I feel like I wouldn't have enough creative expression over my own sensibility, and also if I only acted, the notion of surrendering my fate and future to other people is deeply unsettling to me and it would make me uncomfortable. — Alex Karpovsky

Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me. — Chuck Klosterman

When you buy my books, you kind of know what you're in for. It's kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you're easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books. — Mary Roach

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. — Jane Austen

Really, if I'm honest, sci-fi is where my sensibility instinctively goes - I'm a big comic-book fan. — Seth Rogen

I'm definitely more at ease with comedy - that's where I started out - and so it's my first love, so to speak, and I have more of a sensibility for it and more familiar with it. Having said that, I also want to be open to everything else. — Omar Sy

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God. — Seamus Heaney

Movies I remember in impressions. No matter how many times I see a film, my memory of it is like a Monet painting...or a Cezanne, depending on the genre. Sometimes all I can muster is a Jackson Pollock. My memory of experience is usually the same: I carry with me only the sensations it gave me, the general outline of its content, the essential colors that strained my sensibility in the moments I took it in. I don't remember dialogue or specific action. Only shapes and impressions. — Kim Cope Tait

Being Jewish is a big part of my artistic sensibility and my humor ... I think it gives me a certain take on the world on a literary level. — Adam Mansbach

I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today. — Nick Antosca

An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative. — Peter Schjeldahl

Like my maestro, Juan Ribero, she believed that photography and painting are not competing arts but basically different: the painter interpets reality, and the camera captures it. In the former everything is fiction, while the second is the sum of the real plus the sensibility of the photographer. Ribero never allowed me sentimental or exhibitionist tricks-none of this arranging objects or models to look like paintings. He was the enemy of artificial compostion; he did not let me manipulate negatives or prints, and in general he scorned effects of spots or diffuse lighting: he wanted the honest and simple image, although clear in the most minute details. — Isabel Allende

The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction. — Brian Ferneyhough

So are you going to marry me or what?
He smiled that smile that had been making me feel something like drunk these past few months, and I felt all my sensibility and reason start to beat their wings as they prepared to fly away. Again. — Dorothy Koomson

I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape ourselves. — H.G.Wells

For a person of my sensibility, you're only left with the Democratic party. — Neil Peart

My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing. [ ... ] Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one's writing and one's beloved)
these have nothing to do with gender. [ ... ] The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It's her own, it's uniquely hers. Not because she is a "female" but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more "feminine" in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today ... But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. [ ... ] — Joyce Carol Oates

There are people," my father continued, "who are born to be unhappy and to make others unhappy, who are the victims of celestial intrigues incomprehensible to us, guinea pigs for the celestial machinery, rebels allotted the part of a rebel yet born - by the cruel logic of the celestial comedy - with their wings clipped. They are titans without the power of titans, dwarf-titans whose only greatness was given them in the form of a rigid dose of sensitivity that dissolves their trifling strength like alcohol. They follow their star, their sick sensibility, borne along by titanic plans and intentions, but then break like waves against the rocky banks of triviality. The height of the cruelty allotted them in lucidity, that awareness of their own limitations, that sick capacity for dissociation. I look at myself in the role forced on me by the heavens and by fate, conscious of my role at all times yet at the same time unable to resist it with the force of logic or will. — Danilo Kis

Zoolander was more of my own sensibility. — Ben Stiller

I don't remember my mother. She died when I was one year old. My distracted and callous sensibility comes from the lack of that warmth and from my useless longing after kisses I don't remember. — Fernando Pessoa

I have a certain sensibility that I bring to my writing that comes from knowing two things: what I as a reader like to read, and what as a writer I am capable of. I know my own limits. I know there are things I cannot do. — Paullina Simons

One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Pure, existential space was regularly winking at me, each time in a more impressive manner, and this sensation of total freedom attracted me so powerfully that I painted some monochrome surfaces just to 'see,' to 'see' with my own eyes what existential sensibility granted me: absolute freedom! — Yves Klein

I've been playing the Wolfenstein games since I was a kid, and feel that their outlandish sensibility has deeply influenced my own writing and directing throughout my career. — Roger Avary

For good or bad, there is a certain level of generalisation when it comes to my work. I want to break that perception. My decision to direct 'Bombay Talkies' or to present 'The Lunchbox' is an attempt to do that. These are the films that gel well with my sensibility, and it's unfortunate, it's not the perception out there. — Karan Johar

Much of the time I'm an introvert, by choice spending a lot of time on my own. I suppose liking my solitude is part of a writer's sensibility. — Robyn Davidson

I envy the sensibility in Europe, appreciating beauty in women as they age. I'm going to go that way. I might dye my gray hair for a bit, but beyond that the buck stops. I'm not having any work done. — Rachel Bilson

I also love the zombie genre, my zombie fandom going way back to 'Night of the Living Dead.' And 'The Walking Dead' is truly the ultimate representation of that sensibility in the comic book genre. — Gale Anne Hurd

Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in precise detail what Caligula did to, and with, his sisters, and I can quote it to you in Latin or in my own translation if you wish. I am interested in historical truth, and truth in history is often unpleasant and distasteful to those of fine sensibility. I frankly doubt that you will produce anything to shock me. — Mercedes Lackey

My choice of colors does not rest on any scientific theory, it is based on observation, on feeling, on the experience of my sensibility. — Henri Matisse

I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project. — Douglas Wood

If I were a psychiatrist, I should advise my patients who suffer from "anguish" to read this poem of Baudelaire's whenever an attack seems imminent. Very gently, they should pronounce Baudelaire's key word, vast. For it is a word that brings calm and unity; it opens up unlimited space. It also teaches us to breathe with the air that rests on the horizon, far from the walls of the chimerical prisons that are the cause of our anguish. It has a vocal excellence that is effective on the very threshhold of our vocal powers. The French baritone, Charles Panzera, who is sensitive to poetry, once told me that, according to certain experimental psychologists, it is impossible to think the vowel sound ah without a tautening of the vocal chords. In other words, we read ah and the voice is ready to sing. The letter a, which is the main body of the word vast, stands aloof in its delicacy, an anacoluthon of spoken sensibility. — Gaston Bachelard

Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra - they'll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those. My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigour when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style. — Zadie Smith

I credit my parents for instilling in me a good work ethic and the sensibility that God serves those best who serve themselves. — Ken Osmond

You're not hurt, are you?" "Only my delicate sensibilities. — Rosemary Clement-Moore

Music video played a huge role in developing my sensibility as a director. — Tamra Davis

My favorite Wes Anderson movie is 'The Darjeeling Limited,' because I have two other brothers, and I just feel that connection so well. All of his films have something so great and unique about them, that I don't know how I would be if I don't like them. I wouldn't be me. My personality is his sensibility. — Tony Revolori

There's something about my films; they're informed by my sensibility. I have the same preoccupations, the same interests ... there's just something in the nuance, and so you always know it's a film of mine whether I sign my name to it or not. — Woody Allen

The thing that worries me is that I'm so different from other writers. Connecticut is just another state to me. And nature - well, nature is just nature. When I see a tree whose leafy mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast, I think, 'Well, that's a nice-looking oak,' but it doesn't change my way of life.
Now I'm not going to stand here and run down trees and flowers. Personally, I have three snake plants of my own, and in a tearoom I'm the first one to notice the geraniums. But the point is, I keep my head. — Jean Kerr

There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't ever try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they're bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again. Maybe I'll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn't snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I would not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. — William Cowper

I don't feel that I'm strictly Danish; I don't feel that my sense of humor is strictly Danish or my human sensibility is strictly Danish. — Susanne Bier

If I could change one thing about myself I'd be less highly strung. I find my sensibility quite high maintenance. — Philippa Gregory

My mom was always a fan of just really elegant, sophisticated pieces. I mean we grew up in Maine, so we didn't have a lot of call for black tie or anything, but I think I definitely got that sensibility from her. — Anna Kendrick

'Mad About You' fit my sensibility the most of any show that I worked on, and as a result, it was really fun. It felt like a very natural fit. — Maria Semple

Holy Christ . . . are we talking zombies here?" Church smiled faintly. "We're calling him a 'walker.' Short for 'Dead Man Walking.' The head of my science team has too much of a pop culture sensibility. — Jonathan Maberry

If you have a little sensibility or a heart, you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I'm happy, I just want to dance. — Marjane Satrapi

I would describe my aesthetic as definitely personal and harmonious with an eclectic yet bohemian sensibility. — Lisa Marie Presley

I guess home is where the heart is, as they say. I've moved around the stage a lot - but I had intended on moving to New York anyway so I could live closer to Ireland and to Europe. That's where my sensibility is. This has just facilitated that process. — Sean Mahon

A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains. — Maximilien De Robespierre

I shook my head. "it's not about living in a city."
It wasn't. Back then, it wasn't just getting away. It was about not coming back. It wasn't just the size and sensibility of this place that made in unbearable, but its pull - the weird magnetism that could sap your ambition, clip your wings, leave you inert and fascinated and sinking ever deeper into the choking quicksand of small-town life. — Kat Rosenfield

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American. — Jane Green

I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn't change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. She said: "The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. "Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way. — Emma Thompson

I do what I feel I know how to do and don't do things that I don't. I'm a product of my sensibility. — Scott Rudin

Glitter family is my long-time favourite term for this: the people who those of us pushed to society's margins (and beyond) make our cohort. Glitter is known to be shiny and unruly, easy to get and hard to be rid of. I love the drag connotations and the femme visibility of it, as well as its unmistakably queer sensibility - look only as far as glitter-bombing for proof that nothing is as thoroughly and satisfyingly queer as glitter. — S. Bear Bergman

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out. — Matthea Harvey

I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me. — Ashton Kutcher

We debated, and he offered praise. He always wanted to know how I came up with things. No one else has ever been so intensely interested in what I think. He never wanted me to be simply "pretty" or "a good girl." His desire was for me to think, to develop internal endurance. He encouraged me in sports, challenged me to think. He helped develop my political sensibility and demanded that I respect people, cultures, and religions. I was never to assume that my truth is the only one that matters. In a sense, the way he brought me up laid the groundwork for how I'm able to see the world. Why — Nina George

My husband is my best friend; he knows my sensibilities. — Vera Farmiga

So just to be truthful to my own sensibility, I need to acknowledge that the season is not all joy and light for a lot of people. It's tough - environmentally, emotionally, spiritually. — Sting

My casting process was slightly different and slightly interesting insofar as I knew everybody could act. That's something you've seen. You know people can. You've seen them on the screen and you think either they're a good actor or a bad actor. So that's not the point. What I wanted to do was find people who I thought would have a similar comic sensibility. — Dan Mazer

Perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffet seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that's hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American's yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes. — Barack Obama

Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear.
The book of Disquiet — Fernando Pessoa

I could not excuse a man's having more music than love - more ear than eye - a more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings. — Jane Austen

To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth. — W. H. Auden

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

He brought a sensibility and a hard-edged reasonableness to operating restaurants that had a lasting impact on me and still affects how I run all our restaurants today. The passing of 'Restaurant Man' - the original gangsta 'Restaurant Man,' my father - was the passing of an era. No one can replace him. — Joe Bastianich

Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensibility! Or why not my fortune adapted to its impulses! Tenderness without a capacity of relieving only makes the man who feels it more wretched than the object which sues for assistance. — Oliver Goldsmith

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent. — Alexander Hamilton

I'm not saying it isn't frustrating that my films haven't gotten a bigger release, but I'm really happy with them and if you just keep cranking and eventually, if you have a certain sensibility, some of your movies will hit and some just won't. — Alex Winter

There are good books, indifferent books, and bad books. Amongst the good books some are honest, inspiring, moving, prophetic and improving. But in my language there is another category: there are Ah! Books. This is one of them. Ah! Books are those which induce a fundamental change in the reader's consciousness. They widen his sensibility in such a way that he is able to look upon familiar things as though he is seeing and understanding them for the first time. Ah! Books are galvanic. They touch the nerve centre of the whole being so that the reader receives an almost palpable physical shock. A tremor of excited perception ripples through the person. — Vernon Sproxton

When I do operas, I'm not really singing very classically. I have a classical background as far as being a pianist and an oboist, but my voice isn't really classical in the operatic sense. But I certainly have a classical sensibility, so I'm comfortable being in that world. — Jason Graae

My general sensibility is most certainly comedic. But when I signed with my manager, he said, 'I think you could do dramatic stuff as well.' So, rather than making the choice to do it, I sort of agreed and deferred. By no means does it feel close to home, but I was willing to explore it. — Benjamin Koldyke

Nobody is here without a reason ... I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always
wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it. — Lily Tomlin

In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I'm more classic, because that's what customers like. In Monaco, it's classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it's a contemporary French restaurant that I've developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how. — Alain Ducasse

People who grew up before the blogosphere, I just think that your brain is wired differently. I feel like in some ways my sensibility is aligned with people twenty years older than me than somebody six years younger. Because there was a sort of cutoff. — Meghan Daum

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. — George Bernard Shaw

My first experience with music was my father, he was a stereo buff and he built his own little Hi-Fi center with recorders and everything and I listened to a lot of jazz, which gave me a sensibility for melody. — Ronnie Montrose

I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born.
Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together. — Fernando Pessoa

I have decided that I shan't sweat the small stuff. Sense and sensibility will, I assume, come in their own time. If indeed they ought to come. And in the meantime, I shall continue to work my ass off ... and whenever the opportunity arises ... dance my ass off ... As someone very smart once wrote, 'Those who were seen dancing were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music'. — Amy Mowafi

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention. — Julia Alvarez

Everyone always asks me who my muse is, or who's the girl I have in mind, which is such a hard question for me to answer because I feel like it's a sensibility that varies for each individual. — Alexander Wang

David Foster Wallace, in my opinion, is one of the greatest writers we've ever had, certainly in the last twenty years. His obvious dominance of the English language is partnered with honest moments and the most beautifully dark sensibility. — John Krasinski

Happiness is a frame of mind. It is a state of thinking. It is an attitude, a headset, a mentality. Happiness is a disposition and demeanor. It is a mood and sensibility. It is a philosophy, a notion, a tone, an outlook and perspective. Happiness is all of these things, none of which exist separate from me. They cannot be extracted or stolen because they constitute my very being. Therefore, happiness must be the natural essence of me. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that. — Janet Fitch

When the knife was busy with my life's most intimate tie, my mind was so clouded with fumes of intoxicating gas that I was not in the least aware of what a cruel thing was happening. Possibly this is woman's nature. When her passion is roused she louses her sensibility for all that is outside it. When, like the river, we women keep to our banks, we give nourishment with all that we have: when we overflow them we destroy with all that we are. — Rabindranath Tagore

Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album, I didn't mean to but I just did. — Adele

Photography was so perfectly suited to my sensibility and situation, it gave me a voice, a kind of crazy, out-of-whack voice, at the beginning, but a voice. I could finally put into images bottled up feelings of absurdity and alienation - and also joy and delight. — Abelardo Morell

[Over breakfast] We discussed the 'novelisation' question. This is where the studio pay someone to novelise my script and sell it as Sense and Sensibility. I've said if this happens I will hang myself. Revolting notion. Beyond revolting.
Lindsay [Doran] said that the executive she had discussed it with had said 'as a human being I agree with you
but ... ' I laughed until my porridge was cool enough to swallow. — Emma Thompson

I've been a lifetime Democrat, and I'm re-registering this year as an independent. It's strictly [because] my party, that I've been affiliated with all these years, doesn't stand for anything that I stand for anymore. They've lost any sensibility that they had, and they've allowed all the kooks in, so I'm going independent. — Toby Keith

Every two to three weeks, I was changing around my room. My room was made out of nothing, basically - a magazine, a little radio, a little bed - and I had the sensibility to put things together and match things in a certain way so that they were very special. — Riccardo Tisci

I think my sensibility is very literary; all my books were built as books, and I wasn't thinking about them being movies. — Bret Easton Ellis

I'm Jewish, but my mom's Catholic, so the guilt area is covered. I have the highest expectations, along with the lowest. I tried to put as much of myself as possible in Reality Bites, but in terms of my humor, I'm still trying to figure out what my sensibility is. It's a process, really. I don't feel like I have a very clear idea of what I'm supposed to be, or even of how people perceive me, except that I got put into this Generation X file. — Ben Stiller