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I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.

Alex Garland

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Alex Garland
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: May 26
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Alexander Medawar Garland
Give
Stuck
Still
Wrote
Reason
Second
Whole
Novel
Giving
Maybe
Junk
Sure
Stubborn
Didn
Novels
Stills
Beach

More quotes by Alex Garland

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Of course witnessing poverty was the first to be ticked off the list. Then I had to graduate to the more obscure stuff. Being in a riot was something I pursued with a truly obsessive zeal, along with being tear-gassed and hearing gunshots fired in anger.
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Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.
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I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off
Alex Garland
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If you look at the whole life of the planet, we - you know, Man - has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality.
Alex Garland
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If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.
Alex Garland
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The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
Alex Garland
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Waking was the most reliable part of a dream, as built into dreams as death is to life. You dream, you wake: you live, you die.
Alex Garland
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Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.
Alex Garland
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I carry a lot of scars. I like the way that sounds. I carry a LOT of scars.
Alex Garland
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When I see 'Sunshine,' I see a film that part of me is kind of very proud of and another part of me is very sad about, so it's a really complicated film for me. And I've never been really able to resolve all that in myself.
Alex Garland
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I do all this alone, everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it's my head I'm locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.
Alex Garland
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I've never been to Comic-Con, but I'm certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it's a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.
Alex Garland
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As for me... I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares. I like the way that sounds. I carry a lot of scares.
Alex Garland
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Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.
Alex Garland
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I can kid people, including myself, into believing that something on the page will work. But when you film it, you just think, Oh ....
Alex Garland
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You fish, swim, eat, laze around, and everyone's so friendly. It's such simple stuff, but... If i could stop the world and restart life, put the clock back, i think I'd restart it like this. For everyone.
Alex Garland
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The thing about tourism is just that it's incredibly powerful. It's like a gun and it's incredibly easy to be irresponsible with it. And the speed of the impact that tourism can have on a place can be quite breathtaking. It doesn't take years, it takes months. That's how quickly it works. And it can be quite a bleak thing to witness.
Alex Garland
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Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.
Alex Garland
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I knew my affection for the Philippines was equally as telling: a democracy on paper, apparently well ordered, regularly subverted by irrational chaos. A place where I'd felt instantly at home.
Alex Garland
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I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.
Alex Garland