John Crowley Quotes
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Prosper Olander had never been in a cathedral, but now he felt something like that, the experience of entering suddenly a space so large, so devoted to a single purpose, that the insides of the heart are drawn for a moment outward and into it, trying to fill it, and failing.
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Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.
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The vastest point, the center, the infinity - Faëry, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility - that circle is so tiny it has no doors at all.
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But I'm very happy to work within tight parameters, and when you know you have an actor for two days, and you have to get that work done in two days, that focuses the mind wonderfully.
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You ask for her secret, though you might not know that's what you're about; and she can't tell you without learning it herself. And she wants not to learn that secret.
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Men tend to try to struggle to be more rational and reduce things to simplicity more and are more impatient with ambiguity than women are.
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The world is founded on a pillar which is founded on the Deep.
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Fundamentally, whether directing in the theatre or a film, you have to be a good storyteller, regardless of the form. The thing I had to work hardest at was thinking in shots.
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Sophie's hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been transmuted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing questions like buds, and then at some moment all the questions had become one question: what tree is this?
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'Listen,' she said. 'I get off in an hour. Sit in the back. I'll see you then.' As though they'd agreed to this a long time ago. That was the sign, he was as yet unused to noticing it but he was learning: that sensation that the future has already happened and is only bringing itself about in staging these present moments.
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'Love is a myth', Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.' 'What?' 'In winter,' Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.'
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He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn't believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, 'Don't you want it to be a surprise?'
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This was the problem: if what had to be discovered lay in the what-was-to-be, then they could discover that easily enough. It was what-had-been that was hard to keep in mind. That's the way it is for beings who are immortal or nearly so; they know the future, but the past is dark to them; beyond the present year is the door into aeons-ago.
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Realistic novels simply pretend that the rules of their invented worlds are identical to the rules of actual life, but that's a ruse.
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Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.
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I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare.
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She couldn't see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship long before it could beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she'd known she'd have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.
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What they learned ... was to speak on the phones in such a way that your hearer couldn't help but understand what you meant, and in such a way that you, speaking, had no choice but to express what you meant, they learned to make speech - transparent, like glass, so that through the words the face is seen truly.
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Lately Marge's memory had grown weak, which is to say that it no longer contained the past time on deposit there, it was not strong enough to keep shut up the moments, the mornings and evenings, of her long life, its seals broke, and her memories ran together mingling, indistinguishable from the present. Her memory had grown incontinent with age.
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O great wide beautiful wonderful World With the wonderful waters around you curled And the beautiful grass upon your breast O World you are beautifully dressed.
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You went around back, where in the playground kids were dangling from the jungle gym waiting for mothers; connie could feel their cold skinned knees and barked knuckles–Bunce always said that imagining pain and discomfort was worse for her than the real thing when it came, which it almost never did.
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I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.
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The bottom line is, it's a great script and that's very inspiring and makes you want to overcome whatever technical difficulties you come up against.
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I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.