Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

I was commissioned in 2003 to create an original show, and began developing 'Upwake.' 'Upwake' tells the story of Zero, a modern-day business man, going to work with his life in a suitcase, stuck between dream and reality and not able to decipher the two. I wanted 'Upwake' to have the same audiovisual qualities as a movie would.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

With each of those projects I wasn't thinking about how the layout would really affect the story I was working on - it wasn't the content that was affecting the layout, it was, how I wanted to draw at that point in time.

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects.

I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly - write from your gut.

I've been drawing my whole life. My mom says my sister and I were drawing by age 1. Animation seems a real, natural extension of drawing as a way of telling a story visually.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

The whole thing with animated movies is that it's very hard to get out of your head because it's very moving through each line systematically.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

If I had to choose criteria, for me, it's about first the director. I want to be a part of something that's good and intellectually challenging. After the director it's the character and the story. That's the deal for me.

Acting is contained - you act for three months, then leave it - but writing is the act of creation. Writing is dangerous.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

When you're drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.