Neil LaBute Quotes

In any story, drama may be intensified by the characters realizing by how narrow a margin they had managed to succeed - that is, where coincidence played a role. This is one of the more realistic ways to use coincidence because rarely do we realize how important a coincidental event is until after the fact.

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

Of course on air I use occasional hyperbole to tell a story.

I was always looking for the most dramatic emphasis.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

I write a story as if it were a letter to someone and essentially, that's what you do.

The doctors must tell you that one of the risks of surgery is that you might die. This poor doctor was talking to an actress. It was very dramatic to me. To him, it was just a thing he had to say.

Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.

I always find with dramas that the more that's left to the imagination of the audience, the better.

I love how Shakespeare can really rip your heart out one second and then make you laugh the next. He's a master writer.

[Mary Wortley Montagu] wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed ... 'Les morts n'&#233crivent point,' said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?

Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.

I don’t know. After the downstairs, I assumed something creepier and dirtier.” I shrugged. “You didn’t have electricity down there.” “It’s for dramatic effect.” Loki gestured widely. “It’s a dungeon.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

If the question was did we want to delay the revelation?... Yeah, you want to delay it as long as possible because the audience knows that that moment is coming and you want to make them wait for it. They have to suffer a bit.

I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

I find that when you open on a group of people sitting down and talking, the scene sits down with them. The best antidote for that is an entrance. Begin the scene with someone entering, and somehow it’s more interesting.

Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you've got narration.

Neither eyes on letters, nor hands in coffers.

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

I would put primary emphasis on a good standard of living equitably distributed. It can't be equal, but one that eliminates the terrible cruelty of poverty.

There's a very fine line between pleasure and pain. They are two sides of the same coin, one not existing without the other.

I seen a baby cry seconds later he laughs... the beauty of life, the pain never lasts.