Richard Dawson Quotes

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

Traditionally, photography is supposed to capture an event that has passed; but that is not what I'm looking for. Photography brings the past into the present when you look at it.

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has.

I just yesterday returned from a trip where I photographed a woman with two children whom I photographed first when she was the age of the older of the two children.

I've seen 'Fried Green Tomatoes' too many times. I love life stories told in flashback.

I was formed by 'The Forsyte Saga' marathon. There was something about seeing all those events telescoped that was unbelievably moving: that sense of time as something that can be tinkered with.

The museums and parks are graveyards above the ground- congealed memories of the past that act as a pretext for reality.

I like those kinds of songs that have details that you remember and that have stories that mean something and that open up into different levels philosophically. I like those kinds of movies, and I like those kinds of books.

Happy Days was about a family... although the show was shot in the 70s, it was about a family in the 50s. I realized that kids were watching their parents grow up and the parents were watching themselves grow up. That was the key to the success of our show.

With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

An artist is made to entertain. That's their primary goal, to entertain you. But some artists record the moments of time. You wouldn't know what was happening in the '20s and '30s; you got to check the song or art.

An underexplored reason why nostalgic art is worthwhile is that it influences the way the past is remembered.

I love looking back at my old pictures and pictures of my grandma and my mom and see how they expressed themselves at different parts of their lives, and it just tells an interesting story, so why not play around?

Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

Sometimes the song isn't strong enough to contain the fiction, because memories are fictions.

You have no idea what's going to happen [in Downton Abbey] until you get the script. We roughly knew a couple of the key points that were going to happen, but when I got the last episode, I turned to the last page to check that I was still alive.

Memories must enter the bloodstream, must churn awhile through the heart's mill, must be crushed and polished, be nearly forgotten or cling like burs to other stories before they spill forth in purple patterns, shapes of small bones and worm rot, shapes of clouds and the spaces between leaves.

A story is not only meaning, it's music as well.

Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt.

If I have ideas, I want to put them in the movie. It's not a minimalist approach at all but I feel like it's for the audience. It's about seeing how much texture we can give it and seeing how many things are there for people to latch on to... I just want to do it the way I want and I feel like it won't be helpful for me if I start worrying about that. I just have to follow my instincts. Everyone is going to respond differently to it and everybody's right - that's their point of view. That's how the story intersects with their lives.

I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.