Yahoo Serious Quotes

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

My instinct is to absolutely recoil when talking about writing in a mechanistic way. Nothing could be dumber than writing a film or TV script based on prescriptions, on other peoples' ideas of what character should be.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

As long as you're true to you, you believe it and you make others believe it, then what you're doing is just art. If you give everybody a blank canvas and some paint, not everybody's picture is going to be exactly the same, but it's still art. I just do what I do.

I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly - write from your gut.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

When Walt Disney was making his films, he trusted his instincts and made films for himself, but they appealed to everybody, not just kids.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.

What makes a book unique isn't always about having one big grand new idea. It's about combining many different ideas in new and interesting ways.

Thankfully, as much as Hollywood is interested in brands, I think people are still looking for originality and freshness.

I don't write the same book twice.

You can only write your own vision.

Every brilliant book I read is an influence and an inspiration. As is every brilliant movie I watch and every brilliant box set.

Originality is only variation.

It's very difficult to be original.

Writing is not a McDonald's Hamburger.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

I wrote lots of scripts that never got made and they were terrible. I thought they were good at the time. You can't write two scripts and expect your career to take off. Keep writing. Be you. Be original. A lot of people go for a genre, which is fine if you can do that really well, but we all have such layered histories. We all come from a unique background. Write about your past, write about you. Or make stuff up, but make it about something that really matters.

Storytelling is my true passion.

I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.

Taking nuances from real life will help you make scenes that have never been done before. It keeps the story interesting.