Greg van Eekhout Quotes

I understand why creative people like dark, but American audiences don't like dark. They like story. They do not respond to nervous breakdowns and unhappy episodes that lead nowhere. They like their characters to be a part of the action. They like strength, not weakness, a chance to work out any dilemma.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

There are all these great TV series; you can watch all these hours and hours of shows and ideas, but there's still something great about a movie that unfolds in a couple of hours, and you have the complete experience.

The storyline has always been of paramount importance to me. The subject and climax of 'Phillauri' touched my heart.

My job is not to make you happy. As a filmmaker and as an actor, my job is not to make you feel happy. If you're used to those kind of films, don't come and watch my films.

Even if my songs are quite sad or quite dark, I don't want my songs to make people sad. It's very important for me that all my songs have some kind of hope or light.

I'm really not interested in writing about science at all. I mean, I try to get the information right, the details right. But fiction isn't good at conveying information: It's good at telling stories about people in interesting situations.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

I wanted people to talk about the finale of 'The Vampire Diaries' as one of their favorites, which is a lofty ambition, but it certainly drove me hard creatively to make sure that we had put as much thought and love into it as we possibly could.

I always designed 'Gravity Falls' to be a finite series about one epic summer-a series with a beginning, middle, and end.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.

My favorite films left the camera rest, and the actors and characters have a stage to act. Move the camera when it's motivating.

I feel the primary job of cinema is to entertain.

I've been watching a lot of cable shows like 'The Wire' and 'Breaking Bad' and 'Downton Abbey.' I love how real the moments are.

I think most short story writers, at one time or another, over the course of several books, naturally skirt near the edge of one genre or another.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

Every love story or Hindi film has the same story, but what makes it different is the treatment it's given. Much depends on how it is stylised, how the characters are moulded, and how the story is treated.

I believe that one reason I began writing essays - a form without a form, until you make it - was this: you didn't have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story.

While most episodes have a beginning, middle, and an ending, finales on 'Game of Thrones' are just one ending after another after another, as each of the storylines needs to wrapped up or at least attended to in some way.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

As storytellers, we tend to want to force-feed everything and have everybody understand everything right away, and we freak out if they don't.