Quotes About Storytelling

I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers.

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

The culture is eating nature; it's overpowering storytelling. Movies are turning into games - it's abut the image, not nuance.

In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special.

When I was around 12 or so, I saw 'The Shining.' I just remember that being a turning point for me, where I started to think about the fact that there was a hand behind the film. That it wasn't just this magical story being told - there were actual people crafting these films, and they were works of art.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I go to bars and restaurants, and I sit and I eavesdrop on people and I watch people in shopping centers and, you know, I read the newspapers and I talk to the Trenton cops, and I just get a lot of information that comes in that somehow turns into a book.

'Harry Potter' shouldn't be children's first experience with suspense and plot turns.

The challenge is to stay true to the characters while also having them be entertaining every day, because it turns out that just watching someone be true to themselves isn't that rad to watch.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

The impact that movies, film, and TV have on me - the way that they can toy with my emotions - is beautiful, and I've always wanted to do that for other people.

What's so cool about movies is once you're done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you're there for however long you do the show.

In order to have a TV series, you have to have a good idea for the story.

If one day a TV series comes into my head, and that is what I want to write, I'll write it. It just depends what story is in my brain at the time.

But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.

There's not many TV series that do that, that focus on different characters every season.

I want to create a TV show that people will watch and say, 'Hey, I have a favorite character,' or 'Hey, that person reminds me of myself,' or 'Hey, I've made some of those same mistakes, or those are some of the things I've dealt with.'

I have been sent three or four scripts for television series, but there wasn't anything I really wanted to do. I want to tell a good story, whether it's a TV show, a movie, whatever. That's really my No. 1 criteria.