John Sayles Quotes

We couldn't get it off the ground as a film, but then we begin to think television, and Lowell pushed it out there and Jim and Nick were anxious to do Hap and Leonard anyway, and I had worked with them before, so it was a perfect story. I love the series. I hope there's a second.

Over the years, I have been approached about making Ramona into a cartoon or movie, but I was afraid that no one could really capture the spunky character of Ramona.

Some stories seem to lend themselves to telling right away. 'All The President's Men' was done, what, four or five years after the event? It certainly seemed to work there, as opposed to something that happened 40 years ago.

The thing that keeps me interested is that I love stories. I love going to movies and I love watching stuff that sparks ideas in my brain.

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.

Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I'd head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train.

Sometimes a story idea will come to me, and suddenly I've figured out the whole thing, and I feel like I'm collaborating with something other than myself.

The Bible tells a story. A story that isn’t over. A story that is still being told. A story that we have a part to play in.

The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.

When I journal, I write about images that I've seen that I think might make good stories. I write about things that I hear that I think I can turn into a story. I write about the story that I'm working on and where I think it might go.

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.

There are a lot of celebrities that I think can get a little bit distracted by the way that our society views celebrity. All of a sudden, the film becomes about, "Come see this celebrity!" I'm not interested in that. I want to see a story.

I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

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.

You cover 50 yards on the playing field of faith with a story that downplays your success. You cover 3 yards, or you may even end up backward, with anything that up-plays or promotes you.

I'm living in Los Angeles, I'm in films and I'm on television, and I'm working with actors and telling stories. I'm living the fantasy. My worst day is a great day.

Humans know when it's not a good story. Unless you do this for a living, you may not know exactly why you don't like a story, but you can't fool an audience ever. They know when you have it and they know when you don't.

Television is competitive now, and the great stories live on television right now. I'm finding that I'm enjoying television more than film, these days. That was my motivation to take a TV show.

I don't generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

I had an epiphany where I realised that there are song titles everywhere - in advertising, in conversations with people at the grocery store - and every time I open my mind to that and find titles, I then weave a story around that.

When you're writing a novel, you're still telling a story. But you're telling it very differently. It's a craft like anything else.

Great stories don't often make great movies. Its' a crafted art form.

It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.

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.