Sydney Pollack Quotes

It is not about whether you are an executive, a studio or a network. If you have a story or an idea you can build a following for it.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

Change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die.

Innovation comes spontaneously. I don't know if I've done anything new. If I have, it's just because I had begun to feel for some time that I couldn't stand certain films, certain modes, certain ways of telling a story, certain tricks of plot development, all of it predictable and useless.

I want to do film and TV. I want to make good stories. I want to write; I want to be more involved.

We kept moving forward, kept pretty particular about certain things. Don Handfield is really great with story, so we kept working on it from that angle and developed a lot of IP over the years, which we became very proud of.

But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

So I'm happiest when I'm working with artists and writers, and involved in stories, whether we're talking about animation or movies or comics or television.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

Too few journalists become screenwriters. I say to all the would-be screenwriters: Become journalists. And I’ll say to working journalists: Do not stay journalists. Become screenwriters.

You have to be precise. You have to be specific, but you want to be accurate. That is first and foremost. You want to be on top of the story, but words do matter.

Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.

To me, there are lots of different stories to tell and you usually find the best way to tell the one you are telling once you are in it.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

It's really difficult to have a challenging male-driven show, and certain networks take off because they have their own mandate about what they want to do.

I guess it's a personal preference. Me, personally, I like to be able to tell the stories that I want to tell and do the things that I want to do. It takes a little bit more work, but that's what the production side is.

Perhaps there's another, much larger story behind the printed one, a story that changes just as our own world does. And the letters on the page tell us only as much as we'd see peering through a keyhole. Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

Start producing, some writing, directing is definitely what I want to do and I'll be doing a lot more in the future as well.

I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

I keep trying to train myself to stop saying 'filmmaker' and start saying 'storyteller.' We're telling stories.

I love to write, so I think writing would be the next natural step. And if I'm making something that I'm writing, it would also probably make sense to be a producer and have some creative input from that perspective as well. Eventually, I do want to direct, but I want to get comfortable in those two jobs first. I want to dip my foot into this pool before I dive in I guess.

I think great filmmakers will always talk in terms of storytelling. These guys were always about the story. That is how I love to talk about a film.

We mapped out the whole movie, and then worked backwards from that to do these shows. It might not be a movie. It might be something else.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.