Haruki Murakami Quotes

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

Charles Bean is a brilliant director. I come in with an idea and try to do it, but I fall on my face. And then, he says, 'Wait a minute, there was a little moment in there. Let's try that moment and expand in that direction.'

I find all of my performances come down to mathematics in a sense - how do you approach the problem of this character? Sometimes I crack that problem, sometimes I don't.

When you're making an independent film what you don't have in time and money you have to make up with creativity and diligence.

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

I'm pretty restless in bed, so I can lie there for a couple of hours and be like, 'Hey, that happened today. What if that happened at a zoo?' I'll jot the idea down. Then I'm like, 'All right, so now that it's a zoo, that penguin's loose,' or, whatever. I usually start with broad ideas.

There have been days where I've had two writers' rooms or three writers' rooms going, and you walk back and forth. And then you sort of throw yourself on the sofa, and you go, 'Just talk at me for, like, 20 minutes,' and my brain will catch up with this particular story. But I find that exciting.

The only musicals I've really worked on in New York are new musicals, and I like the idea that my job as an actor is also that of a detective, archaeologist, and mystery solver.

I think everyone loves 'The Departed.' That was a movie that had a lot of problems structurally. And we had to battle with it. Fight. Experiment. Try different things. And I think finally we hit it.

You don't just go to your bosses and say, 'This sucks. I'm supposed to be winning everything.' If you have an awesome idea or a story, or something great, you go, 'Hey, how about we do this,' but when the story is not you, you have to find a way to make it work.

You have to have this straddling balance of realizing that games are incredibly complex. You can have an idea of where you want to go with something, the structure of something, but the actual moment to moment figuring all this out-it unravels over the course of, in 'God of War''s case, about five years.

Film work is a job I like to do because I really love to solve problems.

If I'm stuck in the midst of a story, I take a nap. It often works, and if it doesn't, I still feel better.

Imagining what a character will do in a given situation - it's like an equation, and working it out is a marathon rather than a sprint.

That's what keeps me going: those moments of solving a problem, of what happens to a movie when the right music is added - and what happens to the music when the movie's working with it.

There's always somebody you can call and go have lunch with and just talk out an idea. And it's great, because I need that. It's part of my writing process, to early on sit people down and say, 'Alright, this film I'm working on...' and I tell them everything I have.

I'm quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.

It's always about the project itself than a character for me. It's all experiential.

If you just stay with it and take it scene by scene, episode by episode, all of the questions that I have, as an actor, tend to answer themselves.

Messages hidden in the thickets of a story are the ones that burrow deepest because most of us don't realize that any burrowing is going on at all.

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things