Quotes About Story

The first thing I look at with a project isn't who's directing, whether it's a big film; it's the character and whether I want to tell her story.

The first thing I did on television was a PBS thing where I played a priest. It was a Walt Whitman or Carl Sandburg story - I can't quite remember - but I was a turn-of-the-20th-century priest kind of guy. Never saw it; don't know if I was any good or not.

In a musical, I believe that choreographers are under a great deal of pressure. There's not always the freedom to do what you want to do, because if it ends up being too long the dance breaks are the first thing that will go, because you can't make the story shorter.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

It's the thing I struggle with every day: the mental diligence and stamina needed to sit in front of the computer, open the file, start writing and to keep doing so, word after word, until I've created the next story. A combination of learning disability and chronic health issues make that the hardest thing for me.

If all you have is satire, your show will close. Even if all you have is comedy, your show will close. The hardest thing is not making people laugh: the hardest thing is building an emotional story. Any child can make a group of adults laugh.

I think repetition is the hardest thing to avoid with sequels, because you've told a story and now you're adding more story to the story.

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.

The one thing that I always try and take with me, if there's, like, a remake, or you're doing something again, is that every generation has a new story to tell.

The only thing that's serious to me about music is making sure marginalized people are included in the story.

What's the problem with 'never?' It keeps you from trying. It ensures that you will fail. End of story.

This is the problem with language, and this is what makes silent movies fun, because the connection with them, me or the audience is not with the language. There's no question of interpretation of what we are saying it's just about feeling. You create your own story.

The secret of a successful newspaper is to take one story each day and bang the hell out of it. Give the public what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not.

I firmly believe lyrics have to breathe and give the audience's ear a chance to understand what's going on. Particularly in the theater, where you have costume, story, acting, orchestra.

I have 16 plays, and we don't ever do subtitles. You can't do subtitles in the theater, so I was like, 'I'm not gonna do subtitles.' You'll never lose the story. There might be a little joke that you might miss, but you'll never miss the story, even in the Spanglish of it.

I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.

I've learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.

The beauty of theater is that you get to live the character from beginning to end without stopping. The natural momentum of the story propels you through in such a way that feels organic.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas.

Cornelia Parker has inspired a lot of my theatre work. Her art is about points of impact: it's poetic but with a strong literal story.

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.