Candice Millard Quotes

I don't tend to write straight dramas where real life just impinges. But because I don't, when I do, it is very interesting to slap people in the face with just an absolute of life.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.

The larger-than-life thing is definitely what I'm after. I've always drawn dark stories. Occasionally, I'll try a perfect hero, but it's a real stretch for me. I like 'em warts and all, and obsessive and weird.

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

O'Neill presents a very complex multi-layered kind of challenge. His characters are always deeply complex and, to a great extent, inaccessible.

People don't have these tidy little redemption arcs in reality the way they do in movies.

We live lives that aren't broken into neat three-act structures. On any given day anything can happen, from the hilarious to tragic. So why can't my movies be like that?

The Gift' doesn't deal with the neat, tie-me-up-with-a-bow kind of stories - they are grittier, messier, and not all of them have a happy resolution. You are following people and events that are more difficult, more elusive, and therefore harder to pin down.

After all, life is not a Hindi movie.

There are always loose ends in real life.

How plotless real life was!

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

History is full of surprises.

Life's too damn funny for me to explain.

Life has very little even ground.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.

Life doesn't tend to fix things or wrap them up in bows.

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.

It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.

Fortune, not wisdom, rules lives.