Josh Radnor Quotes

You know, I’m not saying, ‘Oh, because I play a good guy on TV, I need to suddenly be villainous in a movie.’ I look at it more like: does this role has a kind of urgency for me in terms of, ‘Can I not say no to it for whatever reason?’

When I write a film, there’s a particular thing I am wrestling with and the question or concern I’m dealing with has to be big enough for me to dedicate a year or two of my life. If the question isn’t big enough, or rich enough, I’ll lose interest.

When I go to movies and I love the movie, it’s because it feels like it articulated something about how we’re living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It’s more ‘thematically personal’ – what’s up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

Well, I stopped drinking. That was actually a big deal. I didn’t go through any harrowing rock-bottom experience. I just made a decision to stop drinking.

We’re like a gardener with a hose and our attention is water – we can water flowers or we can water weeds.

We don’t have a lot of space in our imaginations to allow people to expand what they do.

We are so vocal about what we hate.

To write a story about New York that only deals with people in your age and socioeconomic bracket, that feels dishonest to me. So much of New York comes from everyone bumping into each other.

There’s something melancholy about professors because they’re chronically abandoned. They form these lovely relationships with students and then the students leave and the professors stay the same. It’s like they’re chronically abandoned.

Time off from the news is always something I welcome.

There’s so much nonsense tossed around about L.A. and how horrible it is and ‘don’t go out there’ and all that stuff. So I went out to L.A. and I was pleasantly surprised.

There are just things you can explore in a movie that you can’t in 22 minutes with a laugh track.

The reflexive allergy to L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have, I feel like it’s kind of nonsense.

Sometimes I watch the broad comedies coming out of Hollywood and I think, ‘You know, sex is a big part of people’s lives, but is that really the only thing men are ever concerned about?’ People are more complicated than they appear in film or television.

One man’s uplift is another man’s sentimental hooey.

No matter how dark things may get in a story, I feel it’s the responsibility of the storyteller to leave the audience with at least a shred of hope.

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what’s the purpose of reading, and maybe that it’s not that cool to hate something just because it’s popular.

My trick is the trick that everyone knows: Work really hard and prepare.

Kindness is not about instant gratification. More often, it’s akin to a low-risk investment that appreciates steadily over time.