Roger Ebert Quotes

Like every novelist, I fantasise about film. Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from, and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

I've seen movies that are slavishly devoted to books but don't work because they haven't turned it into a movie: they've turned it into a dramatisation of the different scenes.

Film as a medium, like a novel as a medium, possesses a unique ability to communicate. Film is capable of communicating in a way that no other medium can, and I would say the same for the novel.

I gravitate much more toward realism, realism in the work that I do, but magical realism got me hooked on film. I think it was my first time realizing that there was something besides popcorn movies.

I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sure everyone else gets it.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

There's got to be something you want to tell and that's the engine which spurs all of the work you have to do in order to create the story, but you have to love some sort of nugget of what you're telling to be a filmmaker.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

The multilevel, the conscious and the unconscious, is natural when I write scripts, when I come up with ideas and stories.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

The whole thing with animated movies is that it's very hard to get out of your head because it's very moving through each line systematically.

A work of fiction is conceived very much the same way as a dream occurs in the mind of a sleeper.