Edward Zwick Quotes

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

With 'Noontide Toll', I wanted to cater to a single story but also collectively more than a single story.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

It's always a good starting point to tell a story that has many layers.

The telling of a good story, especially one that is real and true, is always exciting.

But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.

There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

We want to make sure the stories that show up in Path are both good stories and are a big part of people's lives.

Your first obligation as a writer is to tell the truth and to tell a good story.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

I seldom get into the mood of the story. It's acting. I go in, I act, I quit. I don't take anything away from it.

The best filmmakers, I think, have always had very narrow frameworks for their stories, and then they can go deeply, rather than skimming the surface.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

Good marketers tell a story.

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

Begin your story with a sentence that will immediately grab hold of your listener's ears like a surly nun in a Catholic school.

I'm always talking to the writers because I find it so fascinating, how they're able to go to these different levels with the different stories, and have all these layers to peel back.

A comic book is the opposite of a cartoon. In a cartoon, you want to simplify the idea, so when they look at it at a glance, they get it. Boom. Simple. Direct to the point. But when you're drawing Groo, now it's a narrative, a story. You want the viewer to get involved in the story. You want him to feel like he's in the town to follow your main character. So I love to add lots and lots of things in it. Things that people will enjoy going back to and say, "Oh yeah, that's how a market must have looked in this fantasy world, with people selling meat here and dishes here."

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.