Matt Besser Quotes

I hate when a movie just sort of ends and is so open-ended you feel like it wasn't finished. I appreciate leaving things up to the interpretation of the audience and letting them make decisions about where things will go in the future - but the director has to make a decision; otherwise it is sort of a cop-out.

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

It's absolutely of no importance who or what V was under the mask. He isn't a who or a what, he's an idea. The thing is, you couldn't continue it. Now and then the idea of a sequel has been raised, in vague forms, but I think it would be a bad idea. The story's finished.

I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.

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

In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.

I like to leave a film open-ended, with a lingering feeling. I'll not do sequels of any of my films till I have subjects to explore.

I think the best endings bring you back in rather than close things off with absolute finality. I'm not saying they necessarily have to be ambiguous, but we don't always need to know what happens when everyone wakes up tomorrow morning.

And in stories, endings matter.

Nothing’s worse than a story without an end.

In writing for movies, you obviously want to resolve things and have a sense of completion at the end - in an ideal way.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

I do like to wrap things up and leave some things to the readers' imagination.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

Kubrick never explained the ending to us, or what his intentions were. He didn't intend for it to be a predictable film.

I pretty much believe that a film is a film and when an audience watches a film, they finish it.

Not everything has a happy ending, and not everything has an ending. Some things just kind of dribble away or cut off abruptly.

I often have the impression that the book I've just finished isn't satisfied: that it rejects me because I haven't successfully completed it. Because there is no going back, I'm forced to begin a new book so I can finally complete the previous one.

Our story is a 'once upon a time', but it's not a 'happy ever after'.

In film, you can have sad endings.

When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room.

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

It happened to me on 'King of the Hill,' where I'd left it before the end and didn't really participate in the ending, and I always felt a little bit like I wanted to try a different version of that story.