Story Quotes
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Even if a story has nothing to do with my life, if I can recognise something of myself in the character and think, 'Oh yeah, that's what I'd do...' yeah, that's what I look for.
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Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people for reasons they can't figure out.
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Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.
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All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.
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Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.
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I think that one of the ways that Americans will come to want to look at history is by looking at their own families' histories, and how those stories relate to the larger picture of American history. Then it is no longer abstract. Then it becomes a story that really means something to us as individuals.
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A lot of guys go in immediately for status, as opposed to comfort and allowing their home to tell a story about them.
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The more ways you can tell a story and paint a picture, the better it is.
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Normally, I don't like explaining songs. I don't want to kill anyone's interpretation or the story they want to make for themselves.
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Show me an Irishman who can't tell a story – I don't think they exist.
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You can watch someone on – stage cry and cry – but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.
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I have no problems with remakes, and I think it's interesting. I mean, coming from the theater, we've been remaking 'Hamlet' for a hundred years, so it's no problem to me at all. A good story can be told in many different ways in different places; I just think it's interesting.
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If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers.
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'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.
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The people who knew me and knew my work and trusted me, they knew then as they do now that I've never fabricated or plagiarized a story. People who know me know I didn't do this.
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When my wife passed, I stopped doing interviews and I stopped doing meet-and-greets, mostly because I sort of became this suicide ambassador. Everybody wanted to tell me their story.
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There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.
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Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.
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Managing to tell a story is very gratifying.
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I'm finding now more and more that nudity is so rarely serves the story in any film.
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Reading a Lydia Davis story collection is like reaching into what you think is a bag of potato chips and pulling out something else entirely: a gherkin, a pepper corn, a truffle, a piece of beef jerky.
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I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.
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Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.
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I guess you can stay sort of true to the story; you don't have to artificially bring the character back from whatever doom you've designed for them, you can tell the story, I suppose, honestly.
