Alex Garland Quotes

When you are under time pressure for a decision, you need to follow intuition.

Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

People sometimes talk about the power of first impressions, and believe me, there is truth to it.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

The good thing about being shy though as a child is that you become very observant because you're not really actively participating. You're sitting back watching everyone. I think that's really helped me as an actress because I'm good at observing people and then copying them for comic effect.

Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.

The only people who have quick answers don't have the responsibility of making the decisions.

To impress people as much as we would wish, we would first need to successfully adopt each of their value systems

People tend to hold on to their first impressions - that's why those first descriptions can be so important. You don't even necessarily look at people that carefully after a while; you just hold on to that early impression.

People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.

Reputation is a very interesting thing, and I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I think that there's a part of all of us, especially in a generation where a lot of the stuff gets recorded.

At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.

Land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans, nothing is savored long enough to really understand.

Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

I think it's important to see that, as an audience member, because a lot of times you pass judgement on people, right off the bat, depending on whatever they're involved in or the people they surround themselves with, or something like that.

Boom and bust cycles are very difficult for businesses because you're hiring a bunch because you're planning for the future. And if the future is going to be very big, you need to hire people, or suddenly you go to boom to bust, then all of a sudden, you're kind of battening down the hatches and trying to sail, you know, through the storm, it's a different thing. So part of it is making good decisions about, well, how long is a boom cycle going to be, you know, don't plan on it going forever.

One of the hardest things in the world to say is "President Trump," and not out of disrespect - just because people have known him just as Donald Trump for so long. It would be like if people said, "He's a doctor now, call him Doctor Trump."

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

I look for really great characters. I say great because as long as they're really good, there's something you can do. And really good storytelling. And when people ask me what the story is, I say it's really several stories really. They're intermeshed.

I'm not planning to endorse anybody. I have a long friendship with the family and a long friendship with Jeb [Bush], but I'm, like a lot of people, sitting on the sidelines watching and waiting.

For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

We have only two sources of information about the character of the people around us: we judge them by what they do and by what they say (particularly the first).