Richard Linklater Quotes

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

I'm all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

It's always the story that interests me.

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.

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

The writing is only ever the attractive thing about a part. And also if all the elements within the writing come together - the character and the structure and the narrative - if they are all there then you become excited.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

Not only a great game, 'Uncharted 2' raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.

People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning.

In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.

Strangely enough, the first character in Fried Green Tomatoes was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

I try mainly to just focus on character and what my character's point of view is, with each person, and try to figure out story.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

If the character is true, the movie will fall into place. Or at least that's what you hope.

I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.

The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.

A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going.

When you're doing a movie, it's finite - you have a trajectory of where your character's going, and you follow that. Then the storybook closes.

There's nothing interesting about seeing our characters for an hour and a half do some flashy flying in the sky and beating up on some buildings. It's boring, and people don't want that anymore. They want character, and they want story.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

If a character is going to end up one way, you start them a certain way. If they're gonna end up the polar opposite of that, you might start them differently to have dramatic integrity to their journey.

The story is the only thing that's important. Everything else will take care of itself. It's like what bowlers say. You hear writers talk about character or theme or mood or mode or tense or person. But bowlers say, if you make the spares, the strikes will take care of themselves. If you can tell a story, everything else becomes possible. But without story, nothing is possible, because nobody wants to hear about your sensitive characters if there's nothing happening in the story. And the same is true with mood. Story is the only thing that's important.