Quotes About Storytelling

Sometimes I do feel like I write the same story again and again. And for me, I am always looking for a place with a kind of redemption.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.

My first audition for 'The Magicians' came up in conversation with a close friend who, right then, handed me the first book.

I'm great at telling stories with the kids. I do all my different accents. We make our own stories up all the time, the four of us, me and Hannah and the kids.

As much as it's been difficult to tell my story over and over again, it has been the best thing that has ever happened to me.

I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.

I write, having seen what's happening already in my head. I see it as a movie, and I'm just writing down what's happening in front of me.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theatre than when it came in.

Everyone who made 'Save the Date,' like the writers and the director, they're all happily married and not anti-marriage at all, so that was kind of interesting to me.

One of the many falsities of fiction that we accept quite happily is the non-ageing of characters as they appear across series and sequels.

I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened.

Everyone loves the seventies because that's when movies were character-based, and you saw great characters and you saw very interesting filmmaking. There are interesting movies being made now, but it's harder and harder to make them.

I'd say Rob Reiner's 'When Harry Met Sally' is my all-time favorite. It made me realize there's a way of telling a story where the audience is so in love with the characters that they forget you're even telling a story.

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

At the end of the day, it is just a movie, and we should remember that we're doing it for the audience, and we should have fun doing it. If we have fun doing it, it will come across on the screen.

We have a 25-year head start for the stories of 'Scorpion.' By the time we get to Season Two and Three, the stuff that happened because of Season One will actually fuel Season Three. So it'll become a self-sustainable show.

After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction.

Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.

There is so much going on in our country and in the world today... We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there? Well, I'm turned on by that kind of stuff.

Independent filmmakers already have their heads around people on their couches watching their movies.