Frank Luntz Quotes

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

I used to say to my bubbe, 'Bubbe, is this story true?' And she'd say, 'Of course it's true! But it may not have happened.' What my bubbe was saying is profound: All stories are true. The truth is the journey you take through it - did it make you laugh, cry, seek and want justice? Then it's true.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

You amp things up and you speed things up, but technically, you can still be legally correct. This is the big beef I have with novels as well as television shows - it actually makes for a better show when you accommodate the truth.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.

Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

At its best, film should be like a ski jump. It should give the viewer the option of taking flight, while the act of jumping is left up to him.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art.

It is not meant that the artist, in arriving at truth, must follow the way of the scientist, or, in stating it, the way of the philosopher.

In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

I loved the idea of dramatic art of storytelling as a way to make sense of things. It's really what I love and what I care about.

You know a movie is good when things that are unreal have gotten into your head, and now your day is not the same.

Art is truth.

I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn't occurred to them recently.

I prize something that feels authentic. It's an undefinable thing, but I know it when I see it, and I think audiences do, too. One of the reasons why 'Bloody Sunday' and 'United 93' work is because they felt real, felt truthful.

I think that fiction has a certain power.