I studied Shakespeare in college, but not theatrically, more in terms of literature, and then I kind of took a break from it. Now there's resurgence in my appreciation for him. It's amazing: there are so many book titles and song titles that come just from lines that he wrote.
Songwriters, we're always looking for new concepts, fresh concepts, and there are only so many ways you can talk about partying, really.
I had great English teachers in high school who first piqued my interest in Shakespeare. Each year, we read a different play - 'Othello,' 'Julius Caesar,' 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet' - and I was the nerd in class who would memorize soliloquies just for the fun of it.
In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.
The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.
If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.
It's a fantastic privilege to spend three or four hundred pages with a reader. You have time to go into certain questions that are painful or difficult or complicated. That's one thing that appeals to me very much about the novel form.
Film allows me to ask some really big questions with the time to explore them deeply. I love the form.
Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.
Sometimes you can publish a first novel in a kind of lyrical flourish, but it is not really a lyrical form. The beautiful truths about the world are more hard won than that. Novels should be bleach boned. It's a question of cumulative observation and lived suffering. It takes time.
This is the biggest trick of the sort of thing I write: creating fun, powerful stories with tons of interesting stuff going socially and culturally that doesn't overly confuse the reader.
I enjoy films like 'American Beauty' and want to do similar films that reflect our culture.
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.
No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.
Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.
I love the irony of movies. I really do. For whatever reason, I'm incredibly intrigued by the irony of reality in a motion picture.
Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.
I paint according to the moment and the theme. I don't have any prejudice. Life concerns me.
A lot of my favorite movies come from nuggets of truth.
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.
We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.
I thought 'Mud' would be such an easy film for people to understand.
I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book.
If you look at 'Coraline' and you look at 'ParaNorman' certainly you can tell that there are threads of the same DNA between those two movies, but they're two very different kinds of movies. They look different, they feel different, they are very different kinds of movies.
