Shaping Quotes (page 5)
My thing about looking good is that it should be the character. If I'm playing a character who's concerned about his body - an athlete, say - I'll get in shape. If I'm playing a character who doesn't or wouldn't, I don't. I almost never get in shape for a movie, even though I know it would be a good career move.
Aidan Quinn
What is the possible benefit? Can this material save lives? Can it improve the quality of life in Iraq? Can it tend to shape our perceptions of how war should and should not be conducted? Can it shape our perceptions of who should be conducting war and in what manner? And the answer to that is a clear yes.
Julian Assange
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness insidethat holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner spacethat makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
Lao Tzu
Writers show us the glades we'd missed, the trickling voices of streams, the eyes of a barn owl watching us. A writer like my father revealed a shape and movement amid it all, layers, meaning, perspective, joy, because he paid such careful attention, and paying attention is about the biggest redemption there is.
Anne Lamott
The proletariat could plan to massacre the whole ruling class; a fanatic Jew or black could dream of seizing the secret of the atomic bomb and turning all of humanity entirely Jewish or entirely black: but a woman could not even dream of exterminating males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. Their opposition took shape within an original Mitsein, and she has not broken it. The couple is...
Simone de Beauvoir
You can boil your life down to a single suitcase, if you desperately have to. Ask yourself what you really need, and it won't be what you imagine - you will easily toss aside unfinished work, and bills, and your daily calendar to make room for the pair of flannel pajamas you wear when it rains; and the stone your child gave you that is shaped like a heart; and the battered paperback you revisit every April because it was what you were reading the first time you fell in love. It turns out that...
Jodi Picoult
Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is...
Truman Capote