Judd Apatow Quotes

To me, there are lots of different stories to tell and you usually find the best way to tell the one you are telling once you are in it.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

The goal is to have every character take on a life of his or her own. Sometimes characters will come into the story that I haven't planned.

You set up the story, but the characters start talking, and they go places that you didn't expect. You have to follow.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

'The Names' is planned as a nine-part series. I have a kind of road map: I know the final scene of episode nine. But as to exactly how we get there, what detours or horrible accidents we might have to pass through, I like to keep that a little fluid.

I just have to let the story go the way it needs to go and let them take the detours they want to take, and I'll get to the end.

I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I've found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.

I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.

Let the story lead you. If the story needs to be dark, let it go dark. If it's a sweet, good-for-the-world story, that's what it is.

Well, I think if you're telling a story, a three act structure will just naturally emerge out of it. But I also love it when a film doesn't feel like it's anchored too rigidly to that structure and you feel like anything could happen.

My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it's like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.

I don't particularly like the idea that there's an arc to the story and that therefore in this scene you have to convey this bit of information or emotion. I like more the feeling that, of course, there is a shape to the story, but that each scene should feel right, should be true at that moment, and that gradually you accumulate these moments of truth until you get enough of them together that it becomes a story that's interesting.

If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen. What you want in your writing is to have a sort of wildness that occurs. And then, out of the wildness, a structure emerges.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

When I started to allow the characters to go where they wanted to go, I just had to follow.

Sometimes that happens when people don't really know how long they're going to have to stretch their story out for.

Um, yeah, it's one of the things that you kind of have to accept at the very beginning, like I'm not going to try and be super [deep?] factor and no, I can only do it this way, because that's just not how this film's going to work. Like it's got to be sort of a mesh of reality and complete unreality and you kind of have to accept that and go with it.

Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.

It seems like as soon as you have written something, it dictates a story. So I need to be careful.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

Suddenly, after years of television being the poor relation and film being everything, it now feels like film is a conjuring trick. It's like, "Oh, my god, how are you going to do that in 90 minutes, as opposed to eight hours?! I've got so little time to do this!" It becomes an art form, in itself. Doing both helps you do each one.

There are no rules in filmmaking