Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Quotes

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

It's always a good starting point to tell a story that has many layers.

I remember having been with this book [Into the Forest] for a long time, and I remember the moment that she [Patricia Rozema] sent me the script and what it was like to read it for the first time. I just was so blown away by how she managed to capture the story and their relationship to each other, and the nuances of that.

There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

You're always looking for some new way to tell the same story, but it's how they get to the happy end that is the challenge and the fun for a writer.

I think a lot of ["Cosmopolitans"] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.

I soon found I could not talk about that in a vacuum without understanding the historical, cultural, political context, and giving it some legacy and some roots, and so then it just started to have tentacles that just spread out in all these places, and already a vicious project became pretty overwhelming in scope, and so it was a lot of diligent, day-to-day fighting with the footage, trying to get it down to a place where it was manageable and emotional.

My hope is that I'm going to continue to make more and more challenging work that's going to come out more and more interesting. I don't know if that will always continue to happen, but every one of my films has definitely been a progression as far as complexity of narrative, character, and plot.

Sometimes the easiest-seeming stories to a reader are the hardest kind to write.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

There is no greater power on this earth than story.

A performance can have amazing visuals and special effects, but it has to tell a good story, even if that story isn't original.

I know that my only chance at any kind of depth or profundity is to linger within the story, trying to make it distinguish itself.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

It's a Samurai story [47 ronin], so if we change too much Japanese audiences will have strong against feelings to the film. It's not good.

If time was a string connecting all of your stories, that party would be the point where everything knots up. And that knot keeps growing and growing, getting more and more tangled, dragging the rest of your stories into it.

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

The story is a piece of work. The novel is a way of life.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

There are only two kinds of stories in the world: those about which I do not care to write as many as 600 words, and those about which I would like to write many more than 600 words. But there is nothing about which I would like to write exactly 600 words.

I'm always talking to the writers because I find it so fascinating, how they're able to go to these different levels with the different stories, and have all these layers to peel back.

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.