J. J. Abrams Quotes

I think that we're moving into this new phase of television where audiences are really embracing stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

You know, people aren't watching a network: they're watching cable channels.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

What if you could radically alter the way stories get told? What if the way people wanted to consume content actually changed what you could make?

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

Books and movies are different art forms with different rules. And because of that, they never translate exactly.

One of the things about being on Twitter, for me, is mostly about just being on the pulse of what people are interested in, what people are doing and what people are looking for. I look at entertainment projects and storytelling, and I really try to think about what people want.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king.

Back in 1975, we were making all the decisions about what people were going to watch.

Entertainment and information work well together.

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

Television has embraced so much in terms of storytelling and in terms of a wide array of characters conveying stories from different points of view.

Why fight technology at all? The audience is always going to tell you what they like best. And you, as a storyteller, as a communicator, are going to be required to adjust to that.

Some of the storytelling we did in 'Battlestar Galactica,' to graft that onto 'Star Trek,' it would have required changing the entire format of the show and, really, a different taste of the show.

The way that we're consuming what we watch. Netflix, binge-watching, destination agnostic were not terms. It was about networks, times, dates. Even with feature films, you had to see it this way, in this capacity, at this time. All that has changed. Now it's really about the story. It's a gift that I became a storyteller at this time.

It's like, in movies where you talk to the audience 90 percent of the time, it's - you kind of want to stay away from that stuff. But, you know - but to write exposition brilliantly is hard.

I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.

Part of the responsibility of being a modern storyteller is understanding modern audiences and trusting what they can handle. It's not just settling into what we think they want.

All I care about is the story and telling the story. I don't care how people ingest it.

I think it's intelligent, emotional, character-rich storytelling - at the core, I think those are the most important elements, and I think they can be found across all of our dayparts. That's what, for me, ABC really stands for.