storytelling Quotes

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.