There’s a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn’t give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
The people I’m drawn to are sort of self-created. They came from backgrounds where not much was expected of them, necessarily. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people’s hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing – which is a great thing and a dangerous thing. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
At some point early on, I realized that three of the greatest speeches ever delivered were by Winston Churchill, and they were written and delivered within a four-week period of each other. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
One of the real ways out of conflict is humour. It builds bridges; it’s a weapon against rigid ideology, narrow thinking, intolerance. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
If it’s correct to say that there is a closing of minds around the world, story is one of the most powerful agents of reviving the conversation between ideas. Ultimately, that’s all stories are trying to do – open the conversation. They cannot give a proscription. It’s not clairvoyant art. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
As you get older, you become more vain. But as your looks slowly deteriorate, your eyesight worsens, so it all balances out. Anthony McCarten Read Quote
My experience is, the writer I was when I began was only a fraction of what I feel capable of doing now. Don’t stand on that threshold saying, ‘I’m uncertain about my talent.’ You can grow that part of yourself. Anthony McCarten Read Quote