Danny Boyle Quotes

A lot of shows peak after a series and never get it back, but 'Breaking Bad' keeps the tension up all the time.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

Not only the style, but the way in which you don't exactly know what on earth has happened or is happening till about page two hundred - then it all becomes apparent in a blinding flash.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

As a viewer, I never want any movie ruined for me, no matter what the genre is.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

'Homeland' does have that ability to tear the rug out from under you.

I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.

I love a good cliffhanger. I love when big events happen in shows. I love shows that aren't afraid to take risks and to really do what's best for the story line and realistic for the story line.

It goes all the way back to 'Psycho.' Movies with twists like that are memorable because they're so simple.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

The luxury we have when we do a series is that we go through a long journey, and it keeps a lot of information and things to be revealed.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.

You just never know what the grand plan is on 'Dexter,' so I didn't know if I was going to make it to the next episode, let alone the next season!

On a TV show, you don't know where the character is going.

In the theatre the audience wants to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die.

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

You know, a TV show is a slow build.

I don't really look for a script and go, 'I need to do a thriller, so I'm going to do this.' I just read scripts and look for the best possible story.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.