Frank Miller Quotes

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

I'd rather let the fiction speak for itself and I don't want to write fiction that tells people how to feel, and I don't want to be judgmental in the fiction.

Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

We tried to approach this as though there's never been a Superman movie before, but at the same time respecting the canon and mythology. There are the pillars that you have to respect, and I'm not about to break them. But it is fun for me to bend them and mess with them.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.

I don't ignore continuity, and try my best to stick as closely to the current status quo as possible, but it's not my primary concern when I start a story.

I try to be true to the characters that I've created and sometimes I disagree with them, but their opinions about the story and the characters really matter to me.

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.

I'm not trying to convey a message, I'm just trying to tell a story.

When we started talking to our actors and to our directors, this is with all due respect to the film, if you want to know what we're not doing, go watch the movie. If you want to know what we're doing, it's very much steeped in the world of the comics, but it also has a life of its own and that's really what television and our films really do is that we take the best....We hope and we're very confident that this is the beginning of something that's very exciting on Netflix.

I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual.

His soul is in his stories. I once asked him who inspired him to create his characters, and his answer was no one. That all his characters were himself.

When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

I try to keep my characters raising more questions than giving answers. I don't want to leave too much on the table. I want you to have your connection and your secret understanding of the character.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

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

Some people think I am an issue-oriented writer, but I've never said to myself, I'm gong to write about such-and-such an issue - that would make for incredibly boring writing, at least to my taste. Creating someone I don't know and her made-up world shows us more about who we are - is actually a better mirror - than if I were to parade in front of you an instantly recognizable person in an instantly recognizable situation. I'm not saying, Let's make it all abstract and weird and difficult and thereby you will know more about yourself. My process is much more organic than that.

The filmmaker is not telling you what to think.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.

We tell the stories that we want to tell.