Arthur Herzog Quotes

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.

It always comes down to script and characters.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

Big stories have lots of angles, and you have to decide what part of that story you want to address.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.