Narrative Artistry Quotes

Cinema which is well-made, for any kind of audience, is worthy of being watched by just about anybody who would like to watch a good story being told.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

While I think storytelling is a meaningful way to spend your life... it does feel a little bit secondary or off-point.

I felt so much when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I felt everything. I didn't understand [myself], I was so happy yet so angry and sad. That was the point when I realized that I needed to tell stories and make characters come alive and I needed to make people cry, and make people angry, and make people happy, and make them laugh.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

God is the biggest storyteller, and when we create stories, we connect with him and with each other across cultural, religious and gender boundaries.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

I was always a filmmaker before I was anything else. If I was always anything, I was a storyteller, and it never really made much of a difference to me what medium I worked in.

If anything I try to write something that would be more difficult to film. I tend to see film as competition and would like instead to do what books do best.

My personal mission statement is to combine the intimately human and the grandly cosmic. I like to think that science fiction works on these two different scales.

It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.

Before 'Last Man Standing,' I did a lot of indies, which were raw and controversial and much darker. That is where I feel most secure as a storyteller. That is what I am drawn to the most.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me.

I make movies in order to make things understood, not to be shocking.

Moments are incredible, but in my fantasy mind I see a Globe company which is renowned throughout the world for what it does with pure storytelling. So that people come and say: it's not just the building, it's the only place you can hear this kind of work.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

If there ever is a struggle, making a good movie will always supersede the need to be noble.