David Means Quotes

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 never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.

The action genre is not always the most synonymous with character development.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

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.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

I'm obviously interested in playing characters who have autonomy, who drive the story.

I just have to let the story go the way it needs to go and let them take the detours they want to take, and I'll get to the end.

The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.

I'm interested in telling stories about characters that are interesting and who are challenging in some way, one that will make you think about them afterwards.

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.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.

With the finale episode of 'Gravity Falls' our job as storytellers is to finish all the things we've started.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.