Michael Arndt Quotes
If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

Quotes to Explore
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Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position, back to center stage.
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I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.
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I can be collaborative, for instance, in situations where I go and study the artist's work before I start writing. Then I can at least try to write towards their style.
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When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character.
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So they've actually - it's not that her character is a singer, but she had ambition to do that at an earlier time in her life. So I've actually sung two or three times now on the show.
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A landline is an anchor - busy signals, long distance bills, missed connections and all.
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I think magazines and interviews make celebrities into this bigger-than-life thing, but I've gotten bullied over trying different things with my makeup.
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I have to tell you, TV is an incredibly difficult medium. The most challenging show to do is the hour long dramedy. It's a very tricky format.
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If you look at professional baseball in New York, you can get all 162 Yankee games on television anytime you want. But people still go to the ballpark because they are two different experiences. It's the same with film.
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The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.
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Stationery gets me excited because it has an individual character, unlike computers, which may be convenient but are generic and bland.
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The achievements of willpower are almost beyond computation. Scarcely anything seems impossible to the man who can will strongly enough and long enough.
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It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.
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I think if you work as an actress and are supposed as a character to be in love with some actor, then to some extent you do have to be in love with him.
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Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era.
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I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.
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The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.
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My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
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I make an attempt to do different kinds of films. There's no such formula for guaranteed success.
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We write to know we are not alone
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When you have kids, you instantly feel that you do not want to do them wrong. Those dads that go off to Florida and start a new life, I couldn't imagine that: seeing my kid once every Christmas, every three years. If I'm gone for six days it feels like too much.
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Just because the left has ignored and disparaged truth for years is no excuse for the right to do so as well. And unfortunately, truth-free politics seems to be growing exponentially on the right.
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It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing - which is a great thing and a dangerous thing.
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If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.