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Life is too mysterious to try to map it out. I've certainly lived long enough to know it will take you places you never thought it would take you - and some of those places are kind of wonderful.

Alan Ball

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Alan Ball
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 13
Director
Executive Producer
Film Director
Film Producer
Playwright
Screenwriter
Showrunner
Television Producer
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Alan Erwin Ball
Take
Enough
Maps
Trying
Mysterious
Long
Places
Kind
Lived
Never
Certainly
Would
Wonderful
Life
Thought

More quotes by Alan Ball

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I definitely see the good in people. Certainly in my own life I strive to be somebody who is functional and well adjusted and can face conflict in a non-emotional and non-destructive way, and those are the people I try to surround myself with in my life. But as characters, they bore me.
Alan Ball
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Not everything is going to be successful. To strive for that is really naive. You just do the best you can do.
Alan Ball
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I believe forgiveness is possible for everybody, for everything, but I'm a Buddhist.
Alan Ball
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When I go home, the last thing I want to do is read about the popular lore of vampires.
Alan Ball
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If a scene is longer than three pages, it better be for a good reason.
Alan Ball
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I think sexuality is a window into someone's soul.
Alan Ball
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I'd seen 'Interview with A Vampire' and saw Dracula movies growing up, but I never thought, 'I love vampires I have to do a show about vampires.'
Alan Ball
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In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don't really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it's horrifying. But that's just human nature.
Alan Ball
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Television viewing has become for me a completely different experience, because I don't watch shows on a weekly basis. I wait until the DVD or I TiVo everything and wait until the end of a season and watch it all over a weekend. For me that's a really satisfying experience, like reading a book.
Alan Ball
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I think the world is a place for oddballs and freaks. I'm only interested in oddballs and freaks as characters.
Alan Ball
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Directing is physically exciting because there's a ticking clock, you're working with people, it's very social, it's very enjoyable.
Alan Ball
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I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to work as hard. Actually, I've had to take a good hard look at workaholism and it's effect on one's mental health.
Alan Ball
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And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort of acceptance, a sort of being OK with being imperfect and not focusing on the sin.
Alan Ball
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Beauty is in the strangest places. A piece of garbage floating in the wind. And that beauty exists in America. It exists everywhere. You have to develop an eye for it and be able to see it.
Alan Ball
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The difference between film and TV is the pace. You don't have the leisure of time in television.
Alan Ball
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Most of us live in artificial environments and then we go to work in artificial environments and the world becomes something that you see through a window.
Alan Ball
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I would say try to tell stories that you care about as opposed to stories that you think will sell.
Alan Ball
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I know a lot of shows are like, 'Here's the pages,' right before they start filming. I'd have a heart attack. The anxiety would be way too much for me. I don't have as strong a backbone as those other show writers.
Alan Ball
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As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.
Alan Ball
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It's a lot harder to find fault with the mundane details of daily existence when you really, really know on a cellular level that you're going to go, and that this moment, right now, is life. Life isn't what happens to you in 20 years. This moment, right now, is your life.
Alan Ball