Timeless Storytelling Quotes

The original 'Edge of Darkness' was fantastic, a fabulous series. It was of its time, but this film version shows that times really haven't changed.

I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.

I hope people find my movies funny and will watch them years from now. And, in terms of writing, I hope that something remains that will not seem old-fashioned, that will still have a ­vibrancy to it 50 years from now.

My hope is that, in years to come, people will still be watching 'The Clone Wars,' and they'll still hold up. That's my goal - time tested.

But since doing the film ["The Invisible Woman"] I've really learned to appreciate [Charles Dickens], he's phenomenal. "Great Expectations" would be one of my favorites.

I think 'Wreck-It Ralph' can stand proudly in the pantheon of the great Disney animated films. It's a fairy tale disguised as something more contemporary. With its balance of heart and comedy, it is still very much rooted in the Disney legacy.

Mary Stewart will always be my goddess. I can pick up one of her early books - one I've read a dozen times - and still slide right into the story.

More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.

'Star Wars' is mythology. It's like Greek mythology or Shakespeare. It's the story of good versus evil over a very long span of time. The storytelling is universal and timeless.

I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.

Many books have mattered enormously to my life and work. 'David Copperfield' by Charles Dickens would be one of several contenders for 'most influential.' I first read it at 13 and have reread it dozens of times since.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

Novels help us to resist the temptation to think of the past as deficient.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

Hemingway always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures.

The thing about Pixar, they don't do the 'trend is your friend.' They're really about timeless story telling, and that's pretty great.

The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.

There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It's a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it's a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time.

Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of 'National Geographics,' is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

American audiences love period pieces. America doesn't have a lot of old things. It's a new country so I think we're a little bit fascinated by that.

If you make the movie from your heart and it stands over time, that's what matters to me.

I chose the American ones, more or less the last five years of the silent era, because those are the ones that aged the best in the way they tell the story. One, it's about human beings with context. It's a very classical story with feelings, with laughter, melodrama and it really works, the good ones - Murnau's American movies, John Ford's Four Sons, King Vidor's The Crowd, or the (Josef) von Sternberg movies. You can watch it now and it still works. I mean they are really, really good pieces so this is where I tried to work.