Alexander Payne Quotes

All movies aren't fun; some are hard work. You try to do something and convey a set of emotions that have to do with some real life kind of stuff.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

From an early age, I had always loved drawing. Laying on the floor, in front of the fire, drawing from my imagination, marching soldiers, dive bombers, spaceships and monsters. Now, suddenly, I was drawing from real life!

Within the mainstream cinema, I feel you can experiment and make sensible films. It's possible to tell a story with characters and emotions which are real, genuine, and which need not be over the top.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I like characters. I like spirited characters whether they exist in fiction or real life. Whether they're the invention of artistic people or directors, musicians. I think music and art and fashion designers inspire me and I like characters.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

'Black Swan' does what Hollywood movies have always done - it spends its energies on getting some surface things right while getting everything important wrong. Darren Aronofsky, the director, applies the same techniques and the same sensibility here as he did with 'The Wrestler,' only with a prettier protagonist.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

On 'Southland,' when a helicopter joins our scene, we don't skip a beat. The actors talk louder because that's what cops do in real life.

The demarcation between an art house film and an entertainer has blurred, only because a larger section of the audience has accepted such realistic films.

The lovely thing about writing is, well, two things. One, writing fiction allows us to bring an order to our lives that doesn't exist in real life. And two, it allows us to create human characters that we know better than we will ever know anyone in real life.

It's good to stay as close to real life as you can, and then kind of dress it up.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.

The drama is a great revealer of life.

If I can't find real situations that interest me in real life, then I'll go and write them in play form.

I look at the film as an opportunity to see some bountifully creative minds do something that I could not do - tell the story with images. I can't wait to see what they do.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.