Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The material dictates the approach.
If you're a smart writer, you listen.
a dream is only a memory of the future
If 'Fargo' is about anything, it's American madness.
Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."
My own personal experience has become more first-hand.
I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.
I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.
In LA, you think you're making something up, but it's making you up.
Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy?
In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.
Like all paradises, Topanga is pitched at the tipping point of promise and peril.
Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.
I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.
It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.
I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn't make 'The Avengers' for me.
Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.
Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.
David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.
L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility.
Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.
I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.
'Lincoln' is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way.
Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.
In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.
To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.
I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.
When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it.
In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.
As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.
The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood's view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade's view of everything else.
The most telling thing about 'Fargo,' both the now-classic movie and the television series, is that it doesn't take place in Fargo.
The Doors formed on the beaches of Los Angeles, in what you might imagine is the tradition of local rock bands since the Beach Boys.
While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.
The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.
A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we're future saturated.
Often a performance can be judged not by a movie's strongest moment but by its weakest, especially when it's the picture's crucial scene.
Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son's favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.
Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra's creative emergence as the best singer of his century.
Notwithstanding the likes of 'All the President's Men' in the 1970s or HBO's recent 'The Newsroom,' film and TV have always loved to hate the press.
If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.
By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.