Howard Hawks Quotes

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

I think it's the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page

People are interested if you tell stories well and relevantly.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

It looks like the writer is telling you a story. What the writer is actually doing, however, is using words to evoke a series of micromemories from your own experience that inmix, join, and connect in your mind in an order the writer controls, so that, in effect, you have a sustained memory of something that never happened to you.

In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.

Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.

I like when you are telling a story and fall into an impression.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

I prefer the plain and simple sentences: the ones that you don't notice because you're so interested in what's happening to the people and events that the sentences are creating.

I looked around at what my colleagues were doing, and asked myself, 'What relationship has it with what's going on?' I found there was a great distortion of contemporary life. Photographers were interested only in certain things. A visually interesting place, people who were either very rich or very poor, and nostalgia.

People who don't like musicals like, 'why are they singing? Why aren't they just talking? If you make the lyric feel really conversational, it's much easier for them to bridge that gap.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

I don't like talking about my work at all. I find it very difficult. I never know what to say. It's too close to me, and there's so many things happening unconsciously while I'm working that I'm not aware of, and people will point these things out to me, and I'll say, "That's interesting." But I don't know what to make of it.

In journalism, especially, we tend to deal with large, complex systems by finding especially interesting people and story lines to focus on.

What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.

It's very difficult to have a successful series that can continue to capture and captivate an audience and keep people interested. Because the story, you've got to be able to continue to tell this story.

My biggest lesson ... was to try and create narrators that were believable. ...so the listener becomes really invested in the story or the song.

I think the hardest part of writing anything is getting exposition out easily, without hitting people over the head with it.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... To make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Everyone is interesting except the narrator in a first-person story.