Carlos Ruiz Zafon Quotes

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time.

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.

I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

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 wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.

'21 Grams' is only one story told by three different points of view, but they are really physically connected - literally, with the heart.

I love intricate plotting and exciting twists, but I realize more that people enjoy a good story in a simple, focused way.

'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

Every time I got 'Amazing Spider-Man' or 'Fantastic Four' or another book firmly on the rails, we got pulled into some big event book or crossover and it cost momentum and messed badly with the pacing and structure of the book.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

Movies tend to be dislocated and non-linear in their process.