Carlton Cuse Quotes

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

In writing for movies, you obviously want to resolve things and have a sense of completion at the end - in an ideal way.

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

Yeah, I don't necessarily like endings that contrive an artificial moment of completion.

I think the best endings bring you back in rather than close things off with absolute finality. I'm not saying they necessarily have to be ambiguous, but we don't always need to know what happens when everyone wakes up tomorrow morning.

I must say, I always - from experience, when I watch TV shows and I see characters leave without a proper explanation or leave with not enough time, I get irritated. I like it when there's a clean-cut reason or a defining moment where they have to go. Whether that's death or not, I think that's subjective.

Cam disappears at the end of 'Rapture.' It was the only way for me to say good-bye to him at the time, and it's the way he prefers to split, anyway. I always knew I would return to him. He's been my favorite from the start. Readers have long asked what happened to him, but I had to wait for his story to come to me on its own.

While most episodes have a beginning, middle, and an ending, finales on 'Game of Thrones' are just one ending after another after another, as each of the storylines needs to wrapped up or at least attended to in some way.

And in stories, endings matter.

The critiques I received from my father's community didn't actually have to do with any of the things I'd been afraid of - spiritual or cultural aspects - they were more annoyed that I'd killed off this character or those characters hadn't hooked up or I'd done an open ending and it didn't give them a sense of closure that they were expecting.

You know not every book has to have a happy ending, but it has to have a satisfying ending.

I want to feel that my characters evolved into a place that they deserved, that was sometimes unexpected, but where I would feel satiated that logically they have come to a conclusion that makes me feel satisfied.

Each book needs a good beginning and a good ending. People get pissed off when you don't close things off properly at the end.

My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play

Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.

For the really scary stuff to work at the end you have to fall in love a little bit with the family and want then to be ok. And once you get the audience to buy in on that then they care. They want them to be okay.

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

Hawaii doesn't smell like sex to me. It's the only place in the world that smells like that, but it's not sex, it's - freedom.

The book works better if I know everything I can about the ending. Not just what happens, but how it happens and what the language is; not just the last sentence, but enough of the sentences surrounding that last sentence to know what the tone of voice is. I imagined it as something almost musical. Then you are writing toward something; you know the sound of your voice at the end of the story. That's how you want to sound in those final sentences: the degree that it is uplifting or not, the degree that it is melancholic or not.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week. So the events that occur are rarely life-changing. But with film, you can say that this thing only happened once; this is a major thing that happened to these people.

Certain stories that you want to see resolve in certain ways are, and some aren't, but that's life.

Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.