William Faulkner Quotes

If a character dies, you should feel that. If a character accomplishes something, you should feel that. That's where you try to find that balance. It's impossible to articulate, as you go through it. You just have to recognize it.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

I think that's something that people feel that I do really well; I don't mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn't want to move people?

I love to be a vessel through which characters can come through. And if I can move an audience with my work, then I've done my job.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

If the crew is hit by the situation that we're trying to portray, I think we get a real and a stronger moment with the camerawork and the actors.

I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

We have no filter for music, but we feel it when what's being spoken and sung is telling a story and evidencing a character.

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

I do get stressed at times, but I love what I do as an actor. This is the part that I don't like. I don't actually like talking about - I wish I could just go and get on with my job, because I love getting a script, breaking it down, working with other people, bonding with other people, fighting with other people, and out of those arguments, creating something that nobody expected and seeing it all come together. Telling a story, having an impact on people's lives, moving them and making them laugh.

What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.

As a director, you try to do things that are going to touch the human experience somehow, and emotions that mean something to people. You search for those projects and you hope to realize the potential in a project.

It depends on the story and the filmmaker. And it depends on the character, and the heart and soul of the person that I see on the page, and if it resonates with something that I think I can summon in myself.

In all my work, I try to tell great stories that people want to go to the movie theater to watch, or want to turn on, and are compelled to watch it, over and over and over again, and will make a mark when they grow up.

I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

When you find theater writing like in the theater on film but it's realistic, it doesn't matter who the character is, you want to do it.