Taika Waititi Quotes

I never let the technical stuff get in the way of the storytelling.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

This is absolutely the true answer, no word of a lie, 100% guaranteed: Q: What's the best way to turn my idea into a story? A: Whatever works for you.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.

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 never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

If the script is telling the story well, that is your inspiration, and you do not need to go somewhere else.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

I'm not an outliner. I come up with a premise and then take it from there.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

Every creator sets up their world differently. That's what's so amazing about someone like Aaron Sorkin and his writing.

It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

You just write about things that happen.