Kevin Macdonald Quotes

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

Part of George R.R. Martin's brilliant storytelling is taking the carpet out from under your feet.

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.

One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

The technology we have available is not being used, and we don't have to tell stories in a line anymore. We can tell them in the shape of a tree. I can't stand to see it not happen, and I'm going to make it happen.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

The thing about Drew Goddard and Mike Schur is that they are legit geniuses, and they love storytelling. They love creating worlds, love messing with the audience; they love doing things that we don't expect. To get to be a part of that is too good to be true.

Normally, if I would read in a script that there's mostly flashbacks and mostly voiceover, I would run as far away as possible.

Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

Once I'd worked out that I couldn't possibly expect people to enjoy a monstrous, 3000-page book, I realised I could in fact create a labyrinth of a story with four different points of entry. But what interested me was creating something that would rearrange itself every time you read one of the other books. So depending on which order you read them, the implications and angles would change. To get that right, each one of the books had to have its own personality and texture -- even though they are connected, they are very different creatures.

It is very linear storytelling, and I think that's not so much the fashion. I was watching a new drama the other night which was extremely non-linear, where you flash back and flash forward in ways that certainly keeps you on your toes as the audience. There's not much of that courage with the storytelling in our Maigret film.

With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

I'm not drawn to stories that are just sort of fluffy. I'm just not, and I've tried to, and as a kid I was never drawn to them. I always chose complicated.

I don't seek controversy. I don't seek to antagonize. Sometimes it happens, but I'm not there to argue politics.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

Many can argue - not many converse.

Donald Trump is somebody who I think likes to mix it up and to have a vigorous debate.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

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.

But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.

My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.