Miriam Shor Quotes

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

You can't do the end of the world in a conventionally dramatic way or Boy Meets Girl way.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

If I watch something, I want to be wondering what is going to happen next; I want to be engaged in a way that makes me ask questions and think about how I can relate myself to the characters and the issues that are there. But if it's just fluff, and everything is spelt out, I find it difficult to concentrate.

Normally, in a film with lots of twists and turns, half of them don't make sense; they're just there for their own sakes.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

I love intricate plotting and exciting twists, but I realize more that people enjoy a good story in a simple, focused way.

I love my stories being multi-layered, and coming at it from different angles, so that you don't understand the film's true emotional motivation until the very end.

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

The predictable thing about 'The Good Wife' is how unpredictable 'The Good Wife' is.

I have problems with the violence and the torture on '24.' What I'm trying to say is that that's not the only story, and I think that the cognitive complexity is as important.

It's not so much that I got that idea at some point, it came up naturally because of the improvisational nature of the story I was telling.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Any actor is happy to be involved with something that's challenging, controversial, and not easily palatable. Things that are too dumbed down or easy to swallow are uninteresting... It's good when people have such a polarizing response.

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

I like stories that grow, that have unpredictable layers. As opposed to Hollywood movies that start out with a lot of shock and noise and peter out into an unconvincing cliche.

Every great story leaves you questioning. If all of the questions are answered, and everything is resolved, it's boring. There's nothing to talk about afterwards.

I want to give every single character the dimensions and complexity of a main character.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

I suppose I do have an interest in stories that show complexity.

The nice thing about movies is that you can sort of steer your audience toward seeing that there's discomfort, but there's also this sense of, 'Well, we'll tolerate this weirdness because maybe it'll be interesting.'

When you're allowed to tell stories with ambiguity and darkness and things that are still unresolved, that's the dream scenario as opposed to having to fit into a more procedural mode or something a little more conventional. That's not what's working on TV right now.