Molly O'Keefe Quotes

A good story should make you laugh, and a moment later break your heart.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

It is the job of the novelist to touch the reader.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I had a strong vision for 'The Best Man Holiday,' so I was able to translate that to the actors and ultimately to the screen. Things can't get too heavy or too outrageously funny; it has to strike a balance. Tone is everything. If you've set the right tone, you can get away with a lot of stuff. You can get away with making people cry.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

Good fiction reveals feeling, refines events, locates importance and, though its methods are as mysterious as they are varied, intensifies the experience of living our own lives.

Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick really changed the way one-hour television looked and the depth of how deep it could cut emotionally.

When we wrote 'Avenue Q,' we worked hard to create something that could be funny and satirical but also had some surprise moments of heart, moments when the music itself could become a central player and create something sweet and moving.

I'm just first of all looking for a part that's well written and speaks to me.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

We could make the most beautiful film in the world, but if it doesn't have a heart beating underneath it, then no one's going to be interested.

I really care more about the human drama than I do the thriller stuff.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

You have to be able to sustain life. So moments are going to be lighter, but moments are also going to be heavier. I think just the understanding that life goes in a million different directions, and hopefully, if you find excitement by what these characters are experiencing and what they're living through, and you're impacted by them as human beings, then that's the sustainability of the show [This is Us].

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

You could omit anything if you knew that the omitted part would strengthen the short story and make people feel something more than they understood

You know, we didn't want to kill anyone, but we knew that "Star Wars" is a generational tale. It always is. And for it to have some guts and some resonance and true stakes, I don't think that everyone could have come through the story unscathed.

How can you sustain life? [Dan] Fogelman is magic, and I think the other scripts of his that I've read for this show specifically are as beautiful as the pilot script [of This Is Us]. And he said it in a meeting [regarding the stillbirth of a child], "You can't kill a baby every week." But I think the idea that you can have these impactful moments that are as heightened as the loss of a child - it's life.