John Logan Quotes

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

I love storytelling. I love characters that are complicated and layered, real people, that you see why they do what they do.

A story isn't interesting unless a character has real challenges to deal with.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

If I really knew how to do good storytelling, I would be a writer. Mystery is not a huge part of it. ... It's tension, it's relationships. I think it's a struggle.

A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

My job as a dramatist is to find out where these characters want to go, and make it as hard as possible for them to get there.

It was always about the story rather than the character.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

'Ender's Game' has fabulous opportunities for spectacle, where appropriate, but there's also a tremendous central character. It's a balance.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

Roles don't fascinate me. It is the narrative, the screenplay that is fascinating.

Well, I'm always drawn to the drama first. A story is really only interesting to me, if you can remove all of the genre moments and remove the supernatural element, and it still works. Then, I'm interested.

Drama comes from characters changing. If characters stay the same and nothing changes, there's really nothing to look at.

Every character comes with its own challenges.

The writing is only ever the attractive thing about a part. And also if all the elements within the writing come together - the character and the structure and the narrative - if they are all there then you become excited.

If you create a movie that is only character driven, with a weak plot, then you - as a director, you have to make sure you keep pushing the tempo.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.