Marcia Clark Quotes

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.

I try not to take any liberties when it comes to being factual. Sometimes you have to, just to make the song sound good. But I feel like, personally, if you've lived it, then you shouldn't stretch the truth. It should be that experience.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

I don't think good films have messages.

The difficulty with telling stories about real people is you have to find a way of mixing yourself into the matter.

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

You have to take some dramatic license just to make it entertaining sometimes.

I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I know that movies are basically meant to be entertainment, but I'm not that interested in entertainment.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

There’s dramatic license, which is necessary or nothing’s fun, and historical truth, which is necessary or nothing’s understood.

A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.

My art, like my acting, is a profound expression of poetic license.