Life is chaotic and meaningless, and you have to find your meaning. You must find the answer, you can’t just live. That’s the point of story: helping you find your meaning in life.
Influence is just persuasion in slow motion.
Stories build cultures by answering the big questions.
The material of literary talent is words; the material of story talent is life itself.
Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine, it burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.
Stories are how we remember; we tend to forget lists and bullet points.
Stories are the currency of human relationships.
Never sleep with anybody who has more problems than you do.
I cannot be a character in a bad movie. I can’t be.
Life is absurd. But there is one meaningful thing, one inarguable thing, and that is that there is suffering. Fine writing helps alleviate that suffering – and anything that puts meaning and beauty into the world in the form of story, helps people to live with more peace and purpose and balance, is deeply worthwhile.
You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information...
Creativity isn’t learning the right answers but asking the strongest questions.
Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations.
As he chooses, he is.
Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it.
When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl. – T. S. ELIOT.
The dramatist is fascinated by the inner life, the passions and sins, madness and dreams of the human heart. But not the comedy writer. He fixes on the social life – the idiocy, arrogance, and brutality in society. The comedy writer singles out a particular institution that he feels has become encrusted with hypocrisy and folly, then goes on the attack. Often we can spot the social institution under assault by noting the film’s title.
Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.
The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.