Story Impact Quotes

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.

I remember reading 'The Guest' and thinking, 'This is going to be something!'

Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the characters I'm writing about, something happens that they move from wherever they are in the beginning to knowledge or wisdom, they know something they never would have acknowledged or realized if it hadn't been for my book - that for me is what literature does.

I don't like that whole "art should challenge you" thing. Because I don't feel like art actually does challenge you. I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything.

I have been a Christian all my life, but it's impossible to be so deeply involved in these stories without it making you think again, and without it making you consciously aware of the people involved.

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

A superhero movie is only as great as its villains.

I think the great thing about the Jack Ryan films is that the plot and the story always take center stage. If you've done your job as the actor portraying Jack Ryan, you are present enough to make an impact, but you let the story shine.

Great stories move through fear.

I've been spoiled by this project. I was given the script and went in to read, realizing that this was a powerful story and one that wasn't told very often.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book.

If you're directing, it doesn't really matter any more if it's going straight to TV - what matters is whether you have the resources to make a story that moves you.

I feel like I've come out of this grown up, maybe because I live through the character vicariously and she grows up so much during the course of this story.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

The strength of a story is that it stays with people and it gives an opportunity for that story to connect with people where the Holy Spirit intends for it to do so.

If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

That's what a powerful story does. It creates a more intense experience of life for you to watch. That's what a good film does for me, anyway. That process, I enjoy. It just makes for entertaining characters and entertaining films.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

We learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us.

When you work as a cinematographer, the actors look to you for reassurance. When you're lighting them, they can never think you're making an adjustment because of the way they look. If they are nervous, it impacts their performance, which impacts the story.

Much as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, "Fly, you fools." What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he's sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.