Alistair Cooke Quotes

I didn't want to write a grown-up account of Gallipoli. I wanted to find out what would happen if I looked at Gallipoli through the eyes of an innocent.

For 'Game of Thrones,' I realized immediately that it was about the characters.

When the drama attains a characterization which makes the play a revelation of human conduct and a dialogue which characterizes yet pleases for itself, we reach dramatic literature.

I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'

Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright's pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.

Wrestling really is kind of the highest form of theater.

The last element in drama is high stakes. War, of course, is life and death - survival, not only for the story's characters, but often for the society itself. That's why I'm drawn to stories that are built around wars, even if they're not technically "war stories."

It [moviemaking] is about entertaining audiences with great characters and great stories, you want to make people laugh, you want to make people cry, you want to have great music that is memorable. You want a movie that, as soon as it's over, you want to watch it again, just like that. That's what it is, whether it's live-action, animation, hand drawn, computer, special effects, puppet animation, it doesn't matter. That's the goal of a filmmaker.

When a novelist or screenwriter is looking for a subject, the element he's seeking is conflict. Conflict makes drama. Conflict produces great characters and memorable scenes. So war is a natural topic.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

I have no technical psychological interest; it is drama, speech,and events that interest me.

The bottom line of comedy is to be funny, and the bottom line of drama is to be truthful. You can be truthful and funny, but if you're not truthful in a drama than the audience leaves you.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

Everybody always talks about the science fiction genre, in particular, which always makes me think about people in spaceships. I can appreciate that, but that's not really where I think my dramatist aspect lies.

I thought it was funny. I always thought Star Wars and Indiana Jones were basically comedies. The humour came out of their relationships; it came out of the fact that we were basically types.

My role [as a war correspondent] is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless [and] to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world.

I think since I was in drama school, I wanted to direct in the theatre. When you are an actor, you just have to open your eyes and you start to learn a lot about how to survive on set and what's important and how to tell a story. Directing is really about putting yourself out there, to be slapped in a way. You know that in the kitchen, you're gonna get burned. It's very scary but very exciting as well. If you have something to say, you have nothing to lose and you probably learn from the experience.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

I feel sure that coups d'état would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

Can you feel that there is something in you that is at war, something that feels threatened and wants to survive at all cost, that needs the drama in order to assert its identity as the victorious character within that theatrical production? Can you feel there is something in you that would rather be right than at peace?

In my eyes Marlantes has become the pre-eminent literary voice on war of our generation. He is a natural storyteller and a deeply profound thinker who not only illuminates war for civilians, but also offers a kind of spiritual guidance to vets themselves. As this generation of warriors comes home, they will be enormously helped by what Marlantes has written. I’m sure he will literally save lives.

Some day I'd like to cover a war in a country as ugly as war itself.

You face challenges and you have to make choices. You're weighing the necessary responsibility toward reality and authenticity and of course the need to create a compressed drama over two hours.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.