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"Now, before you make a movie, you have to have a script, and before you have a script, you have to have a story; though some avant-garde directors have tried to dispense with the latter item, you'll find their work only at art theaters."
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Exlpore more Storytelling quotes

"My father never told us how the stories worked. He didn't reveal the layers, the nuggets of information, the fragments of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to -- because, given the right conditions, the stories activated, sowing themselves."

"So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?"

"For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories."

"Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell."

"Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own."

"Stories are a communal currency of humanity."

"But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger."

"So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic."

"A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design."

"Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be."
Explore more quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

"There were, however, a few exceptions.One was Norma Dodsworth, the poet, who had not unpleasantly drunk but had been sensible enough to pass out before any violent action proved necessary. He had been deposited, not very gently, on the lawn, where it was hoped that a hyena would give him a rude awakening. For all practical purposes he could, therefore, be regarded as absent."

"I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about."

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering."

"One of the greatest tragedies in mankind's entire history may be that morality was hijacked by religion."

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now."

"I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power."

"Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction. They may be summed up by the phrases: 1- It's completely impossible. 2- It's possible, but it's not worth doing. 3- I said it was a good idea all along."

"There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality."
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