Sam Esmail Quotes

I don't have a great respect for reality or getting the 'facts' as a means of putting together a story.

I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space, and when you do that, it's inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think.

But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.

I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.

I'd like to make something about someone who hasn't existed so that I don't have to tread so carefully and can feel a little bit more creative freedom.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

Only in a novel are all things given full play.

We are going to finish this picture just the way I want it... because you cannot compromise an artist's vision.

The good thing about songwriting is you don't have to delineate between what's true and what's fiction; records aren't put on the shelf that way. Books are, movies are, but records aren't.

I'm not that interested in recreating reality. I'm interested in recreating an emotional truth.

In 'The Serpent's Egg,' I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

If I am writing down something and it is my idea, my imagination, it won't be fact.

I base everything on my instinctual approach. There's something very satisfying in that creativity, and it's a bit like an infant drawing.

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

All of my movies are about how I wish the world would work. I've made very few movies about how the world worked. I could name them on one and a half hands, about how my movies have been very reflective of how the world was exactly. A lot of my movies are really about the way I wish the world was, and that's what this whole art form is all about. It's an interpretive art form.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.

Trust your creativity.