Story Quotes

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

I was going to get the Carolyn Bessette story out of her one way or another.

In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero's not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He's one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.

There is nothing wrong with just telling the story.

I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.

In so many musicals today, the story is moved forward by a song. I don't think we're gonna try to do that.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

If I didn't get a job, between 16 and 18, that wasn't significant, I was just going to go to college. I didn't want to be a struggling actor at 36 with five kids, doing something I hated. You see the story so much. It's such a vicious business to be in when you're not meant to be in it.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

If the breaking news story had to do with hard news, politics specifically, I had a lot to do with it. If it had to do with music, Kurt Loder was more involved.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

Bill Condon, I must say, may have been one of the best professional experiences of my life, collaborating with him. He, himself, is an Academy Award winning screenwriter. He is a storyteller first and foremost, so we speak the same language. We approach things always from the story.

People go to see a film because it's a great story and it's visually exciting to watch.

It's all about creating a back story for the character and developing emotional responses that are true to life in relation to the character. It isn't necessary to live a tragic life to create from that place.

It takes more drawing to tell a story in pantomime.

Well, if you look at the whole story, I mean there's only Jews and Romans in the story. I mean I just wanted to flesh that character out and make that a drama about the people around Christ when he was going through this passion.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew's cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo's choice to know the truth. It's a beautiful, beautiful story.

Emotionally, in our minds, we get so filled with resentments where we've got a story about absolutely everything.

The fact that I was a believer, a Christian, everybody immediately thought this guy's a minister, he's so nice and, oh by the way, he can play a little bit. The other thing for me is being undersized. What a great story, what an overachiever, kind of like Rudy.

We don't feel pressure of, 'Let's make this really raunchy.' It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us.

I lived through a classic publishing story. My editor was fired a month before the book came out. The editor who took it over already had a full plate. It was never advertised. We didn't get reviewed in any major outlets.

To me, a sex scene in a movie generally means a gratuitous scene that doesn't serve the story but gives a kind of excuse - we've got these two actors, we want to see them naked, so let's bring in the music and the soft light.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

You can't completely control the sport - Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature's own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

I now find magic in the mundane. I'm also more creative - better able to look beyond the obvious and come up with new story angles.

We all had to learn Southern accents. It wasn't a big research show. With the 'Wounded Knee' project, I locked myself in my apartment with history books so I would know what we're talking about.