Quotes About Setting

Each of my books is different from the last, each with its own characters, its own setting, its own themes. As a writer, I need the variety. I sense my readers do, too.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

I don't like watching shows where all of a sudden you're like, what happened? They shot the last season in Las Vegas?

Basically with everything, I choose my criteria based on what can be easy. If I made the real world the setting, I'd have to draw looking at reference materials for stuff like buildings and vehicles. When you do that, people complain even if it's just a little bit off.

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.

I looked at Jackie. She didn't look like she had ever set foot in the vile cesspit. She still looked fresh, composed, and perfectly at home in this opulent setting, like a demigoddess lounging around Olympus. It was a very sharp contrast to the scene that had greeted me at my house a little earlier.

She was setting out china cups in their saucers, her long pale hands almost the same color as the cream china. How do you take yours? Four creams, two sugars, Riley said, still mesmerized by her. She stopped with a small waxed carton in her hand. Really? He's very young, Gabe said. I take mine black. He's very boring, Riley said. Is that real cream?

Change the setting, change the mood ... She'd taught him to make himself go outside if he was in, or inside if he was out, to interrupt the plummet with something as simple as making a cup of tea or spending a few minutes working on crossword puzzles.

It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at.  The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height."  At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.

For me, setting and description is a challenge. I always want to get that part just right, and sometimes the words won't work.

Any writer likes to be near the area which is the location of his work.

It's fun to work on location because you get the look and feel of everything, but it's nice to be on a stage because you can control the elements.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

People like Bill Murray are incredible at what they do and are definitely my flavour. Although Will Ferrell, Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais are also incredible actors. In their comedy, they make these stupid people feel so real. These guys are really setting the bar very high, and I learn as much from them about acting as I do about comedy.

The great thing about making a film on a submarine is that it's kind of like making a play. You've got this limited environment.

You can't substitute promise after promise with known violators of prior promises at the expense of protecting ourselves or setting an example.

I grew up, until age 6, in Chicago. My parents rented their apartment and, at the end of the Depression, my parents wanted to replicate that situation. So, again, we lived in a somewhat suburban setting outside of New York City, and again, they rented.

Visually, I love the setting of suburbia.

What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.

Modesty is a diamond setting to female beauty.

Beauty is an evil in an ivory setting.

And I finally found a setting for despair." Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. "So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who's smart has emigrated, don't you think?