Nicholas Ray Quotes

Because you make a world that didn't exist before, and you can go into that world deeper and deeper. It's unbounded out there. One film takes you into one area, another film takes you into another area. There could be trillions, zillions of worlds that exist in the big space.

Anything you can imagine, you can put on film.

I've always played that edge of fact and fiction. I used to be a filmmaker, and certainly in film that's a line that filmmakers cross more readily and more easily than novelists.

The opportunity to create a small world between two pieces of cardboard, where time exists yet stands still, where people talk and I tell them what to say, is exciting and rewarding.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

Part of what I love about television is that my imagination gets to keep going. It doesn't stop.

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.

Storytelling is all about using the imagination, for me at least it is. That's why I'm bored sometimes to see movies. I'm bored to see TV. I never see TV. I see news sometimes. I'm sorry to say, I work in this business and I love working in it, but I haven't seen a movie in so many years.

I didn't have any set idea of what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I knew I wanted to tell stories that meant something to me, but I never said I was going to be the weird, avant-garde guy.

Movies are the art form most like man's imagination.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

The art of movies is to allow the audience to suspend their disbelief. They need to use their imaginations.

I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

I think it's possible to be free in a big production. It's the eye of the director and the actor and the story.

As such, anything is always possible, even if your protagonist is a plumber. But it's the possibility, the limitless possibilities, of any fake life, that make writing about it so challenging.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

Mainly, I try not to think about my readers as I write - I just think of my characters and myself - If they're interesting to me, my hope is that they'll be interesting to others as well.