Top 10 Direct Experience Quotes

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end – whether we’ve had direct experience or not – there’s part of you that knows there’s absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

Any direct experience that I have with indigenous peoples and their plights may feed into the nature of the story I choose to tell. In fact, it almost certainly will.

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we’ve been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.

I think many years ago I got on a bus in L.A. and drove around to see the stars’ homes, but that’s the extent of my direct experience in Hollywood.

I think certainly if I’d started getting published when I was in my early twenties, I was quite sheltered then and didn’t know anything much about the world. I hadn’t had any direct experience of how the world works.

Anyway, in my writing I’ve always been interested in finding places to stand, and I’ve found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I’m writing about.

I do not think direct experience is always necessary to act, but I believe that sometimes you have to have had the real experience to act certain roles. One of those was losing your family member. I was not being able to imagine how sad that could be.

Combine a left-leaning upbringing with a family with direct experience of the Holocaust and someone with aspirations to write and I guess, sooner or later, that person will have a stab at writing something about the Holocaust.

What makes war interesting for Americans is that we don’t fight war on our soil, we don’t have direct experience of it, so there’s an openness about the meanings we give to it.