Conventional Narrative Quotes

I don't really want to make a stylized film or anything too surreal.

Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?

I think a lot of police procedurals are very conventional. With the stuff I'm doing, I'm trying to approach the institution of the police in a different way.

In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone.

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry Malick himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It is surely easier to invent striking situations in this way than to tread the beaten track which intelligent minds have followed throughout the centuries.

I think politics is a higher build in life. You know? If you diffuse under normal, common sense of a story, you make it political. If you choose a conventional way for a story, or refuse to use the conventional way, you make it political.

It's not about finding Mr Right, or that sort of conventional ending, but I do want my characters to have hope - and that's what I do with all my stories.

In a normal movie, you'd never see one guy talk for an entire page, whether good or bad.

I read *old* novels. The reason is simple. I prefer proper endings.

If 'Titanic' was one of our telenovelas, we would probably have added a pair of dolphins to save Jack at the end. We don't kill the good guy.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters.

You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death.

I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.

I feel like movies should stick to a genre and give the audience what they want, and then surprise them with the unexpected, and not just do the same thing you've always seen.

There are so many tropes in 'Sex Education'; don't get me wrong. There are lots of formulaic things, but the reason they're in there is because they work, and we can rework them because people recognize them.