sincere storytelling Quotes

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

What I react against in other people's work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don't believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don't really respond to, but I'm telling myself, 'Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,' then I know I'm on the wrong track and I just throw it out.

I've always been a fan of telling honest stories.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do - really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel - was move towards something like sincerity.

The first thing about a song is that it has to be real, be lived; it has to be emotional, and melancholic. I don't mean sad. Melancholy is sort of a comfort. Melancholy has a sort of beauty to it. This attracts me to every other form of art.

I knew if I evoked that stuff too easily or gratuitously, as a way of assuaging my fears of not being edgy or whatever, the writing would fall apart. This book [Lincoln in the Bardo] was going to have to have some earnestness in it.

I don't have any one way to tell a story. I don't have any rule book of how it's supposed to be done. But I've always said that if a story would be more emotionally involving told, beginning, middle, and end, I'll tell it that way. I won't jigsaw it, just to show what a clever boy I am. I don't do anything in my script just to be clever.

If you tell the story emotionally in a truthful way, then you start naturally looking at the landscape and thinking "Wow, we have to watch out."

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more telling. To know that a thing actually happened gives it a poignancy, touches a chord, which a piece of acknowledged fiction misses. It is to touch this chord that some authors have done everything they could to give you the impression that they are telling the plain truth.

We want a sense that an important character, like a narrator, is reliable. We want to believe that a character is not playing ages or being coy or being manipulative, but is telling the truth to the best of his or her ability...We do not wish to be crudely manipulated...We want to be massaged by a masseur, not whapped by a carpet beater.

I just want something that is real and that moves people. And just want to make something real.

The true writer must write not the acceptable but the true.

Have you ever heard someone tell a story but felt they are just mouthing the words without being emotionally connected? When you do this, you often create a more negative reaction than if you hadn't told a story at all. That's because others can see that you're just going through the motions.

You can't sensationalize a story that is a heartfelt story.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression. I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama. There's a lot of bullshit drama that leaves you totally cold. And there's a lot of wasted comedy time too. But when you get something honest, it doesn't matter what label you give it.

What is the truth is that every one of my films is a film that I'd love to go see, and I think that's very important because I always think it's a mistake to make movies for other people, or to make them for a demographic, or try to second guess an audience.

People connect with my films because they are honest and simple.

Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.

I want to hear the artist. I want to hear them give me something that I can relate to, other than the fact that everything's about bragging.

I'm just happy when directors make a movie that is really sentimental but without being maudlin or saccharine or too much like Chewels gum. I don't want to be involved in a movie that's too much like a piece of Chewels.

Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.

I set myself up for a lot of trouble by wanting to tell a story that is fairly earnest and emotional and expressive, but to do it in the most subtle, realistic way.

I never quite understood why Disney hadn't made a sincere fairy tale since 'Beauty and the Beast.'

I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.