Brian Azzarello Quotes

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

The fiction I'm most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

The mini-series 'The Bronx is Burning' thoroughly embarrassed me the way the story was told.

Listening to the stories told in jazz music and how those artists expressed their truths about the times and what they were dealing with is what struck me the most.

All films speak to their times. It becomes obvious only after.

I am just reflecting the times. I can't ignore them.

I like writing historical fiction.

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.

Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

I prefer to make movies which not only have a message for 'then' but a message for 'now.'

Music and fashion are a sign of the times and a reflection of what people want and need at this very day and age.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

When you do 'Mad Fat Diary' or 'The Village,' you always learn about the particular time period, and that's always nice for an actor.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

It's about stories. If I can tell the story to America, whether it's Riesling or a boxer from Harlem, it will sell. I know on my gravestone it's going to be, 'Storyteller.'

Obviously when it comes to the question of telling stories about other people's lives in a situation as political as South Africa, you get to be political.

Tolstoy may not be showing that much of Russia at that time even. It's hard to tell. You tend to associate the quality of the period with what's lasted - what's still good. And that quality becomes the whole period.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

It's important that period films aren't seen as just a lovely visual exercise.

The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

Feature film can have a major role in explaining ideas and describing peoples' lives and their struggles.