Daniel Handler Quotes

Because even very young people are expert readers of pictures, you can convey very complex and subtle messages through pictures that you'd need loads of words to explain. Making a picture book is also a bit like making your own film - and you can make anything you want happen, however impossible!

I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.

A good picture book can almost be whistled. ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

I like to shoot feature films because it's about capturing emotions... words like guilt, hurt, betrayal.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.

When you're trying to make a film, you're trying to find a way to love your subject, and you want your audience to love your subject.

I have been in advertising and I know my craft well, but ultimately in cinema every scene has to matter, and that has to do with the writing.

I love to watch videos, and I've always liked to film and take pictures. I have an eye for really weird things that nobody thinks about. I used to make little movies about myself and then edit them on iMovie.

I'm not the greatest filmmaker. There are a lot of better filmmakers than me.

I've been a writer for years, but it was mainly as a function of trying to be a director, so I just got work as a writer. I want to keep directing.

You can't have a movie that's just 'Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom' constantly - you have to breathe.

We always wanted to do a children's book of some form or another.

In a nutshell, directing 'The Gift' was all about understanding how the complex machine that is 'Game of Thrones' works.

As a filmmaker, every tool you get to tell the scene better is important.

I am a film director, and I work with a visual language, with a visual medium. And I try to make virtue of the use of this visual medium. And I try to make sure what I do speaks the language of cinema.

When I went to Jamia, I thought I wanted to be a cinematographer or photographer because I liked telling stories in pictures, but my teachers explained that if you want to tell your own stories then that is what a director does.

I experienced a lot of things while I was working with Dibakar Banerjee.

At the end of the day, filmmaking is all about telling stories, and I'm just doing my part.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

Pictures are written, acted, directed, photo­graphed, edited, scored and all that. The screenwriter determines what scenes are in and what scenes are out; decides whether that bit of information is dramatized or just referred to; whether it takes place on or off screen. There are millions of decisions made by the screenwriter.

Remember the waterfront shack with the sign FRESH FISH SOLD HERE. Of course it's fresh, we're on the ocean. Of course it's for sale, we're not giving it away. Of course it's here, otherwise the sign would be someplace else. The final sign: FISH.