Quotes About Storytelling

I hope that upon this scorched earth we have planted the seeds of ideas that will bear the fruit of more diverse and inclusive stories that include people of color in the LGBT community.

My films, I've tried to put a message into them. It's not about the gore; it's not about the horror element that are in them. It's more about the message, for me. That's what it is, and I'm using this platform to be able to show my feelings of what I think.

You can give me any of Shakespeare's plays and I'll tell you a parallel African folktale.

To have a film where there's an evil figure and a good person fights against the evil figure and everything becomes a happy ending, that's one way to make a film. But then that means you have to draw, as an animator, the evil figure. And it's not very pleasant to draw evil figures.

When I make movies, I don't ever go out there to please anyone other than myself. I never try to make a film for the masses. I just try to tell my story.

I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.

I do not really write for children: I write only for me and for the few people I hope to please, and I write for the story.

I was very pleased with the way that the show ended creatively and personally. It just feels like we've completed the piece. And now to be able to step back a little bit and look at it from beginning to end, I feel good about the complete story that is 'Battlestar Galactica.'

'Daredevil: Season One' is kind of in-between. On the one hand, sure, it's a graphic novel. But on the other, it's beholden to existing continuity, and we're still telling the story in issue-length chapters. So it's not that different to writing a miniseries, and I've done plenty of those.

I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

Sometimes I'll feel down and realise it's because of a depressing plot.

I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.

All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we're big on plot because that's the easy way to do it.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don't believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you'll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.

'Paquita' has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.