Rebecca Stead Quotes

Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

What's important in the filmmaking process has stayed the same. Keep it small, keep it personal, keep it authentic, work with people you like and trust. That process is much longer than the filmmaking process. The development process is a long one, so try and say something of importance.

Sometimes stories are inherently important whether or not they have a direct relation to your life.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing - if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

Be it films or shows or plays, it's the content that matters the most.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses. I think for me it's about what you leave out [rather] than what you put in. I'm not sure that the songs help me figure anything out so much as they're a distillation of the original question.

Story is what's most important.

Clarity is the most important thing to me - in thinking - and so I try in the books to be as clear as possible.

One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important.

The secret of play-writing can be given in two maxims: stick to the point, and, whenever you can, cut.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

I don't think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great - just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.

I don't think anything needs to happen in a book.

Any story that gets us thinking, and particularly young people, thinking why? Whether it's as a result of reading the book, or coming out of the theatre or the cinema, I think we should just simply be asking the question 'why'? Why did it happen to those people? Was it necessary? And anything that gets us thinking like that is really important.

Fiction allows for moral questioning, but through the back door. Personally, I like books that make you think - books you're still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say "Read this, so we can talk about it."

The last thing I want to do is having someone get behind a Montgomery Clift biopic, and then just do the first script that came out. Sometimes it takes a long time for these things to gestate. And I'm only going to do it if it's the right story that's told for the right reason, and that's relevant to this day and age, as much as it pays homage to who this man was. Should that happen during the time when I'm still young enough to play him, perfect. And if not, hopefully someone else will get to play him because I do think it's an incredible story.

I think screenwriter Steve Kloves does such a difficult job. And he does a bloody brilliant job, too. Transferring these Harry Potter books into films and making them coherent is one thing. But making them entertaining, as well, is quite another... He does a tremendous job, and he gets a lot of stick. And it's really unfair sometimes, and I challenge anyone else to do the job he does.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

Violence has been a part of storytelling forever and there's obviously a reason for it. Fairy tales are really violent, the original ones. I think there's something cathartic about having kids live through their fears through a book or any kind of story.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.