Alice B. Toklas Quotes

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

When you do a menu at a restaurant, you have to be the engineer of that menu. It has to be a crowd-pleaser.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

It's much easier to read the stories that have a lot of dialogue; of course, they flow much more easily into speech.

It's always good to have a story arch.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When you're reading a book, you're always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can't really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there's pressure to keep the momentum up.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

I have the 'thing' worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.

The nature of storytelling, since the dawn of man, has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.