Ethan Zuckerman Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

There is nothing wrong with just telling the story.

The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

People like to invent enemies. It spares us the need to address complex worldviews.

The world is complicated. But does every problem require a complicated solution?

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

Film is an oversimplification of things. That it really boils things down and makes them too simple.

Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you're not aware really of the solution.

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.

Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give is the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.

Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

In folk music, I've always been fond of the fragment. The song that has one verse. And you don't know anything about the characters, you don't know what they're doing, but they're doing something important. I love that. I'm really a sucker for that kind of song.

Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

One can't say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards. I suppose if you a playing go or shogi, then such a thing might be helpful, but that is not life.

When a man has a problem very thoroughly and can't solve it, he really has too few problems. He needs more.

Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.