Thomas Perry Quotes

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

'Pathological liar' is absolutely the toughest individual to deal with as a psychiatrist. Because you can't take anything they say at face value. And you can't, you know, fill in their personality. You don't know what's real and what's not.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.

I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.

Whenever I do anything, even the most simple character, I need to twist it somehow, make it more challenging, in terms of psychology and storytelling. I can't just do it straight.

A movie like 'The Apartment' is beautifully directed, but you can't put your finger on why it's such a good movie. It just is, because of all these things that Billy Wilder is subtly doing. That level of filmmaking is something I aspire to.

I thought 'Mud' would be such an easy film for people to understand.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

So Kratos is always angry, and he spent a considerable amount of time after 'God of War' trying to be away from people and trying to figure out how to get control of that. So it is this kind of internal struggle for him at all times.

When you're writing for a game - even if you're using very well known characters like Batman and his villains who lend themselves to many different interpretations - you have to keep in mind that you're writing for a different medium. Things are a bit more straightforward than it is for a feature film or a TV show.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

'Khamoshi' gave me the chance to prove that expressions can also say what dialogue could.

Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.

Whenever we tell the truth, nobody believes us. We lie, and people take it as etched-in-stone fact.

It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time.

It is evident that Qaddafi is mentally unwell. Like Richard III, he has barricaded himself within lies.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

I can't stand characters with contradictory information.

Within the mainstream cinema, I feel you can experiment and make sensible films. It's possible to tell a story with characters and emotions which are real, genuine, and which need not be over the top.

In most films, when we act, we don't see such meanings in what we do. Rather, we don't realise it. Only when we see it as a continuous film later on do we realise such deep meanings. That is the brilliance of the director.

I'm not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot.