Narrative Constraint Quotes

I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.

Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

When I got to the end of this play, I realized I was trying to make Angel do something that had not been justified by the characters and by their story . . .. I kept trying to force it, but that doesn't work. So I had to come to terms with what it meant for me to create a character who doesn't triumph.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

It's great to have the chance to play a character before he goes to the dark side, or the yellow side if you will. Normally, you don't get that opportunity. The narrative of a movie usually demands that you are that guy from the start.

With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.

I think when you're writing prose there's a lot of attendant description and that's were I used to really go bananas. With a screenplay that all gets filled in by the director, so it just sort of pulls you back by virtue of the form. You also have to use more economy as a screenwriter and so it's kind of limiting in a good way.

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

rush of pine scent (once upon a time), the unlicensed conviction there ought to be another way of saying this.

The narrative was too constricted; it was like a fetus strangling on its own umbilical cord.