Matthew Gray Gubler Quotes

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

In writing, I search for believability, simplicity and emotional impact.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

You can be moved by an animated film and not by a live action film. There could be great inspiration in and humanity in that animated story.

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.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

Short stories consume you faster. They're connected to brevity. With the short story, you are up against mortality. I know how tough they are as a form, but they're also a total joy.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

The writing I love has something memorable in it - an image, a smell. It's the connection between the moment and the whole concept, weaving the micro together with the macro so that it has a hold on people - that's writing.

I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

The early seasons of 'The Simpsons' had a great deal of heart. That's what I'm trying to pull from, the kind of stuff that goes straight to kids' hearts. When they're watching, they don't necessarily know why they love something.

A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

No one bothered reading the books and understanding - and again, I'm not being high-falutin' about it - but I think our books are great literature with great metaphors of real life dealing with fears and hopes.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

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.

Readers want a story, not a pattern. It's the specifics of a story that make it really ping our various reader radars.

The thing that everyone remembers about 'Bambi' is that moment. 'The Lion King,' took it to quite an extreme because it was an action sequence: his father was killed in a wildebeest stampede - I related, because mine was, too.

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.