Tom Stoppard Quotes

Even though writing articles relies completely on truth, you still must tell an interesting story. You can't worry about people knowing who you are and whether or not they want to read your stories.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we're big on plot because that's the easy way to do it.

I want to tell Miranda's story more broadly than what I have been in these five-minute videos on the Internet. She can live in a longer format.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

With anything, and especially with the pallet of viewers in watching anything on TV and film, you have to entertain them.

Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

People have to respond to the characters and respond to the situations that they're in. That said, it still has to be a compelling narrative that drives along and keeps people coming back week after week. So really, with any successful show you could name, there has to be a mysterious blend of both of those.

I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.

The TV schedule is essentially four or five days to get in touch with the story you're doing that week.

If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.

I honestly feel like we never had a bad episode by TV standards. Every week I felt there were so many strong components of the show, especially the writing.

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

Connection is what one is after in probably most media, but certainly in film, which is an immersive medium.