Quotes from Paul Haggis

There's nothing more painful than writing.

I just love actors, and I've always loved actors. I empathize with their job. Everyone thinks it's easy, and it ain't. To be that vulnerable and brave on camera is tough. The more they reveal themselves, the more we love them, but there's a lot of truth in what they're showing.

As artists, we have to be brave. If we aren't brave, we aren't artists.

You can't plan for people to like your movies. I knew that people were not going to run in droves to the theater for the 'In the Valley of Elah.' I knew they might not want to see it, but I still had to the movie; I felt very strongly about it. Wanting to keep telling a good story is what you want to do, a compelling story.

I don't think I'm against all wars, but you'd have to have a damn good reason to send your son or daughter to fight, or to go yourself. So often, we are lied to and manipulated by our governments for their own very cynical reasons.

I miss my mother very, very much.

It turns out that good actors can make anything believable.

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

United States could be a great country. It needs to be a great country. It's our responsibility as citizens to make that happen, every single one of us.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

I'm such an antsy type of person. I can't write in a room without other people around. I write in coffee shops.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

I just asked myself, what piece of that man's soul did he just chew off and swallow to get next week's assignment? You know, just to live, just to work as an artist, or to feed the family?

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.

If you're in a relationship and you try to trust somebody who's completely untrustworthy, when trust is the basis of any relationship and everyone else says not to trust, is love transformative.

Every 10 years, I know less about love and relationships. The smarter I get, the less I know.

I have so many questions about love. How do you win at it? Especially if you're in a relationship with an impossible person? What if you believe in someone who's completely untrustworthy, who at their core can't even believe in themselves?

My kids paid the price for my career. We can say it's for our family, but it almost never is. It's about us. It's just some of us can pretend better than others.

In 'The Next Three Days,' even though it was a prison breakout movie, I was asking myself, 'What would I do? How far would I go for the woman I loved? How far would I go, and what would I do when the person then told me that they were guilty? Could I still believe in them?' So it was very personal.

Even a modicum of celebrity is hard to deal with. You see it with actors and directors all the time.

I try not to think of actors as I'm writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they've already done.

I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.

I just figure if you have a modicum of celebrity, you need to use it, and you need to use it for more things than just promoting yourself or your film or your image or your product.

I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.