Robert Cormier Quotes

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.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

As a writer, Chris Columbus was a big influence. 'The Goonies' was the first movie I ever saw that kids speak normally and not imagined how kids would talk. Always a big fan of Chris Columbus' dialogue and storytelling.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

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.

When you are working on a movie, you have to ensure that the journey of characters ends in two hours.

In terms of script, Bollywood should learn from South Indian scripts. Not talking about the fights and action, I am talking about the drama bit.

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

For me, it doesn't matter whether it's a comedy, a Western or horror. As long as you've got a good story to tell, the genre almost doesn't matter. As an actor playing the role, it's all rooted in reality.

In a great horror movie, you've gotta have some character development and you've gotta set some of your people up and you've gotta have a little back story going. You've gotta take that time for exposition.

I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots--things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story--readers see an unknotting of sorts. Not what you expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable, emotional experiences.

Good drama must be drastic.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story. That seems to be forgotten. Many films today just rely on special effects and they have an explosion every five minutes. Who needs it? It's rather repetitious.

I definitely want to do films. To see a character out from beginning to end in a matter of a hundred somewhat pages and then move on to the next role, is fascinating.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I've always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane.

Sometimes people that are very good at improvisation in life, meaning like stage improvisation, aren't good in films because you have to ultimately take a scene where it needs to go. It's not about just saying something that's funny. You can say something funny but if it's not on story or driving the scene to its end it's really not very helpful at all.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.

Directing made me realise what I do as an actor that's extraneous, it focuses your mind on story, story, story.

I love writing in first person more than third. I have to basically suspend my own world. I don't exist. I'm just a conduit. So I can be eight years old. I can be the mother of a kid that you find out certain things I'm not going to say.

First lead [in a movie] requires a different approach like trying not to give it all away in the first scene. It is a skill, a learned skill.

It felt like an indulgence. Going back was painful, but, at the same time, it was nice to live with them again for a few pages. I got to live with my brother again for the entire book. Of course as I'm writing the book, I'm getting closer and closer to the end and I know what that means. I knew exactly where I was heading. It was really difficult, but it was nice to make them come alive for those scenes. It was good.