Cameron Crowe Quotes

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.

What I keep searching for in movies, more and more, is the right gravity.

Because they're my stories, they're my version of events of the past three years. But I really hope people can hear their own stories within the songs and they can become our version of events.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

I want to do films I can relate to emotionally.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

The writing I love has something memorable in it - an image, a smell. It's the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people - that's writing.

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

No matter who the characters are, you can strip them down and find small universal truths.

I love flawed characters, male or female, and I only want to talk about flawed characters, really, in what I do.

A good comic explores the imagination, but it's always got to have those notes of truth running through it.

I'd done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

I love exploring the characters that I play, but the reason I sign on for something isn't the details of the story but the universal message.

You're only reduced to a cliche if you don't humanize a character.

I want to do stuff like 'Lady Bird.' I want people to say, 'She told amazing stories.'

As an actress, my ultimate goal is to create a universal experience in my acting.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.