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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
Giving
Maybe
Junk
Sure
Stubborn
Didn
Novels
Stills
Beach
Give
Stuck
Still
Wrote
Reason
Second
Whole
Novel

More quotes by Alex Garland

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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.
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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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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Normally, small talk is enough for me to form an opinion of someone. I make quick judgments, often completely wrong, and then stick by them rigidly.
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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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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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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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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By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
Alex Garland
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It slightly depends on your perspective, sort of how you look at these things, but when I sit down to write a script, I'm not planning to write a script I'm planning to make a film, and so I only see the script as being just a step there.
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.
Alex Garland
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There are one hundred glow-stars on my bedroom ceiling. (...) Glow-stars are strange. They make the ceiling disappear.
Alex Garland
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There's this saying: in an all-blue world, colour doesn't exist... If something seems strange, you question it but if the outside world is too distant to use as a comparison then nothing seems strange.
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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Uh... what can I say? Made money. Given a launch pad for a working life. Set a precedent I had no interest in following. Created expectations that I was not cut-out to match. Disappointed virtually all of my readers subsequently. But I like what I've done, and I stand by it all.
Alex Garland
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I used to think about video games, This is clearly an amazing, new narrative medium, and it's going to be mind-blowing when people get to grips with what's possible within this medium. It took us a century to get really good at film. Video games are at a much earlier stage.
Alex Garland
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Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.
Alex Garland
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I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.
Alex Garland
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The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Ko Sanh Road.
Alex Garland