Joel Coen Quotes

That's the thing with 'Lost': you can put a spin on so many things.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

A film that I love is 'Deliverance' from back in the day. You start out with these archetypal characters - the hero, the bookworm, the pacifist - and by the end, it's all turned upside down. I love that.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.

There is always a reason why, and I need to tell the stories.

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

The thing I loved about Alfred Hitchcock is that he left a lot of open ends there, a lot of clues that didn't really add up the way you think they would, and sometimes, not at all.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.

I never want to dumb it down. If there's any simplification, it's just a simplification to make sure that the reader understands the point that the character is trying to make.

I like stories that leave you wanting more, leave you wondering, but don't tell you everything.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

My stories are often a little mysterious.

I think it's such a challenge to tell a story, and I think, to be honest, the shorter, the clearer, the better.

A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.

I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.

We find few disputes, that are not founded on some ambiguity in the expression [thereof].

I like endings that let your imagination do a lot of the work.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.