That was cool, getting to work with Ryan Gosling. I knew he was going to be a huge star after I saw him in that Showtime thing that he did when he was really young [The Believer]. I think the most fun thing about that was I'd never seen somebody that had so many questions about the specifics of everything: where you ate, how much you ate, how much you drank. He's very special.
I expect to be more specific about how specific we will be in the future.
On the other hand, there are only so many people who really knew how she was exactly, like what did her accent sound like, and the fact that she developed profound deafness when she was first running the Harriet Lane.
[Military] events are proof that success is not due simply to general causes. Particular factors can often be decisive—details known only to those who were on the spot. There can also be moral factors which never come to light; while issues can be decided by chances and incidents so minute as to figure in histories simply as anecdotes
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she.
Everything was very specific and very fitted. I can't tell you what we went through for this job in regards to full body scans and the prosthetic process that you go through and all that kind of stuff, but everything was done very specifically to fit you perfectly.
I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.
It is necessary, in order to know things well, to know the particulars of them; and these, being infinite, make our knowledge eversuperficial and imperfect.
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!
Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.
The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.
In exposition and in argument, the writer must likewise never lose his hold upon the concrete; and even when he is dealing with general principles, he must furnish particular instances of their application.
I think good art, if I could be pretentious enough to say, I think good art deals with the micro to explain the macro.
The language of the poem is the language of particulars.
My father writings stuff was always his personal stuff, like about the day we had to put our dog down, or finding old photographs of his father, or passing a guy he went to boarding school with on a street in New York. Very specific, detailed, descriptive columns that he wrote. I think in a way, it could be argued that my best songs are that way too. They're almost journalistic in that they're very clear, and very specific, and they describe things.
I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
I usually start from the most general to the more specific. I'll get an emotional overview for the film as a whole, trying to pinpoint what the musical identity is and come up with thematic ideas - any ideas that identify as succinctly as possible what the film is.
History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others.
I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.
You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.
