Paul Schrader Quotes

The experience of reading a novel and watching a television show are quite different. You can't let your audience get ahead of you, and you have to keep the energy and the pace and the drama up. They're very different things.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.

As long as you keep the audience on the edge of their seats, either scare them or keep them guessing, you can put anything in there that you want.

My books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

I don't like the info-dump, as it's known.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

A lot of shows, things will just simmer and simmer and maybe never explode into the open, or only risk exploding into the open when it's clear that the series has gotten to its endgame. So I'm always impressed - but not surprised - when 'Scandal' just completely goes for it.

I didn't watch much television growing up, and before I did 'Boston Legal,' I had no understanding of what it was like for a viewer to look forward to finding out what was going to happen the next week.

In my experience, very few people walk out of a movie. You have them for two hours, and you're free to explain or not explain whatever you see fit.

I don't write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they're a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You've only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

I think audiences can feel when they're being served a filler episode.

I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don't like that. Because once you know where you're going as an audience member, then it's like a video game. You're just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that's boring.

The first rule is you have to create a reality that makes the reader want to come back and see what happens next. The way I tried to do it, I'd create characters that the reader could instantly recognize, and hopefully bond with, and put them through situations that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

Cliffhangers are a lot of fun, but I think they can be easily abused if you're not careful.

When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.

Some directors ask for a hero introduction number, a duet and a fast number towards the climax. Most of the times, these songs only hinder the story.

I feel like with a movie you know your whole journey, and even though little minutiae might change, you're able to get a better idea of where you're going, whereas TV is engaging a different side of your brain.

A viewer's imagination is a powerful storyteller, and can often come up with things way more frightening than what you can explicitly show in a horror movie... try to engage that imagination, and the results can be magical.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.