storytelling Quotes

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.